Bruce Beckwith wrote:
You should deal with a registrar for this information, since that is one
of the services they can provide for you.
Right, but in a case where my client inherited a domain from their predecessor, and has no idea who their registrar is, I seem to be in a catch-22.... This was my purpose in issuing a whois query to begin with- to learn which registrar they need to contact to make DNS authority changes.
OTOH, if you are suggesting that I should contact *my* registrar of choice to obtain this information... this seems more than a little ridiculous (to me at least, and I suspect OpenSRS is not going to appreciate getting a new support ticket every time I want to do a whois to figure out what other registrar has a domain that my client doesn't even intend to transfer to them).
Why should I {e-mail|call} to get what used to be available with a simple whois query? What have we gained by making this process even more complicated? I have no beef with the use of Registrar IDs, I'm sure there are benefits to using them. But I do think that they are a poor substitute for what used to be human-readable information.
If you are interested in the cross-reference list, please see
http://www.pir.org/whois_search/registrar_whois_ids, which can be
accessed via the link at http://www.pir.org/whois_search/.
In addition, if you choose to use the web-based whois, then you can use
the link on the whois output for the registrar - so for example, the
domain nanog.org is at
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?yes_popup_flag=0&whois_query_field=
domain+NANOG.ORG, and using the link for Sponsoring Registrar, in this
example "NSI(R63-LROR)" will give information on how to reach the
registrar - see
http://www.pir.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?yes_popup_flag=0&whois_query_field=
registrar+id+R63-LROR.
Thanks, but again this seems unnecessarily complicated. Why can't your whois server do this for me as .com/.net are, and .org used to be?
I.E.
$ whois rockynet.com
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
Domain Name: ROCKYNET.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC. <- This is all I really need
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net <- but this is helpful too
Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org <- this is icing on the cake 
At the very least, I think it's only reasonable for the pir.org whois server to provide some basic help text on where to get more information, i.e. as Tim Wilde pointed out: For more information do a 'whois -h whois.pir.org "registrar id r11-lror"'
If I knew a bit more C, I'd hack my copy of whois to do this for me automagically. For now I guess I'll live with having to do two whois queries to get the information I need (I'm stubborn and would rather not use the web-based whois, since I'm already in the shell for the corresponding digs and named configuration- that's what I liked about whois, it was a nice general purpose tool that could tell me certain things about any domain with one simple query).
Mike
