The gateway to Whois servers

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2 total messages Started by murphy@dccs.upen Fri, 07 May 1993 13:27

#3944

Author: murphy@dccs.upen
Date: Fri, 07 May 1993 13:27

40 lines
2103 bytes

I have a question about the gateway to whois, the items in this gopher
menu: gopher.tc.umn.edu 70 1/Phone Books/WHOIS Searches

The question is: Does the use of this gateway really have to _double_
the usage of a Whois server?  I've noticed that for many months now,
the SAME EXACT query would come into the Penn whois server within
seconds of each other, but from two different hosts.

Between approximately 11:44 AM and 12:54 PM (a little over an hour)
today, the log shows these lines (as well as a bunch of others which
were all from on-campus hosts, so I've omitted them):

736789471    1     1     3  morrison             GOPHER.ND.EDU
736789477    2     1     3  morrison             MOZART.HELIOS.ND.EDU
736790867    1     3     1  williams, scott      GOPHER.ND.EDU
736790870    1     3     1  williams, scott      LAFCOL.LAFAYETTE.EDU
736790903    2     1     1  chance               GOPHER.ND.EDU
736790905    1     1     1  chance               LAFCOL.LAFAYETTE.EDU
736790930    2     3     0  smith, amos          GOPHER.ND.EDU
736790933    1     3     0  smith, amos          LAFCOL.LAFAYETTE.EDU
736791061    2     1     0  Alstair Ling         GOPHER.ND.EDU
736791078    4     1     0  Alstair Ling         ERNIE.PRINCETON.EDU
736791110    2     1     2  Ling                 GOPHER.ND.EDU
736791114    1     1     2  Ling                 ERNIE.PRINCETON.EDU
736793362    2     1     0  anthropology         GOPHER.ND.EDU
736793369    2     1     0  anthropology         ARX.ADP.WISC.EDU
736793606    2     1     2  keane                GOPHER.ND.EDU
736793609    1     1     2  keane                WINGRA.ADP.WISC.EDU
736793694    1     1     0  philadelphia         GOPHER.ND.EDU
736793697    1     1     0  philadelphia         WINGRA.ADP.WISC.EDU

Using Whois servers in this fashion is quite inefficient, and
irresponsible.  At the moment, whois queries are not terribly
expensive for us, but if they were, the gateway usage of this machine
would be crushing our server.  Please explain why the gateway behaves
so strangely, and what plans there are to fix this problem.

--lam

Re: The gateway to Whois servers

#3989

Author: trier@slc6.ins.c
Date: Mon, 10 May 1993 20:11

17 lines
885 bytes

It's not entirely clear to me how that whois gateway works, but judging
from its incredibly low speed on our whois server, it looks like the
gateway is first searching the server (to confirm that it is up?), then
hands the gopher client a "Search results" entry which causes the
client to send the whois server a second search.

I don't know why the first search is necessary.  My best guess is
confirmation that the server is up, but that doesn't seem a good reason
to double the load on the whois server.  It seems to me that handing
back an immediate "Search result" would be sufficient.

--
Stephen Trier (trier@ins.cwru.edu)   Star Trek dialog mistake of last week:
Network Software Engineer              "We've tried every decryption key
IRIS/INS/T                               on record, Captain."
Case Western Reserve University             - Geordi LaForge, ST:TNG, 5/1/93

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