26 Whois

Prototypical answer:

The FRL registry will operate a whois service available via port 43 in accordance with RFC3912, and a web-based whois service at whois.nic.frl, providing a free and publicly available query-based access to the domain name and registrant information. The web-based service will be protected against abuse with a captcha element. The port 43 service will be protected against abuse with throttling capabilities and logging of IP addresses and search queries.

The format of the whois responses follows a semi-free text format, followed by a blank line and a legal disclaimer specifying the rights of the registry operator, and the rights of the user that queries the whois service.

The whois service will respond to domain name data, registrar data and nameserver data queries, as specified in specification 4 of the registry agreement.
The format of the data fields that show domain status, names of individuals or organizations, addresses, streets, cities, states⁄provinces, postal codes or countries will conform to the mappings specified in RFC 5730, 5731, 5732, 5733 and 5734.

The web-bases whois service at whois.nic.frl will be searchable with wildcards and partial matches on domain names, contact names, postal addresses and its subfields described in the EPP rfc’s. With boolean logical operators AND OR NOT users can combine several search criteria.

The whois services will log each search request for internal reporting, and for monthly reporting to ICANN.


Technical implementation

The whois implementation will consist of a set of whois servers, querying the EPP administration database on a read-only basis. Since the whois solutions found in the open source did not have search capability, we have decided to write the whois solution ourselves, using the java language protocols already in place. Whois queries will be dispersed by load balancers over multiple active whois servers.

The newly written whois servers have the following role:
1. Perform basic whois lookup capabilities for any internet user. This includes basic information about registrant, administrative contact, technical and billing contacts for a domain objects. Also it will show attached nameserver information and dates and times of information update. The whois solution will comply with Dutch privacy laws, displaying only data that is not privacy sensitive. For all whois information, authorities or other parties that have a right to see the complete whois can register with the registry to get access to the full whois, see role 2.
2. Perform advanced whois lookup for authorities or other parties requiring full whois lookup capability. The whois server will accept the IP address of the querying server to determine if full access is granted. Registrars that are connected to the registry will also be granted full whois lookup possibility, to the extent of 110% of the number of domain names in their portfolio per day.
3. Perform nameserver (host object) lookup functionality. This lookup can be performed by any internet user.
4. Perform registrar lookup functionality. Full contact lookup is only granted to authorities or other parties that have been granted full access.
5. Searchable whois, as described in specification 4 of the draft registry agreement.


Whois abuse prevention and mitigation
All whois servers are fitted with throttling capability, and will report on a daily basis on how many queries were done from which IP address. If an IP address or range of addresses will perform too many queries, the throttler will deny access to that address range for a specific amount of time.

If too many whois queries were done from one single IP address or range of IP addresses, the address range will be blocked whois access.

The whois services will comply to Dutch privacy regulations. That means that the whois services will only show a limited amount of data on private registrants. This makes the public whois service less interesting for abuse.
Parties having a legitimate right to all administrative domain name information have the possibility to request access the restricted whois service. They will be able to log an IP address range with the registry and query the web-based or port 43 whois from that IP address for full whois access.


Resourcing for the WHOIS functionality
The resource indentifiers used in this document are detailed in the text of question 46


Resourcing for the startup phase
R.1 System engineer Technical installation, server setup 1 day
R.6 Project manager Whois startup 2 days
R.7 Programmer Programming and testing 3 days
R.8 Tester User acceptance test 1 day



Resourcing for the management phase
R.2 Operations engineer Technical infrastructure management 1 day⁄year
R.5 Support engineer Handle whois support questions 20 days⁄year
R.6 Project Lead Oversee changes 2 days⁄year
R.7 Programmer Program changes 5 days⁄year
R.8 Tester User acceptance test 2 days⁄year
R.9 Release manager Software release 1 day⁄year

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