Discuss mailing list

[Jamyn Shanley <jshanley AT gmail.com>]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 4:47 AM, Martin C <martin AT mchomenet.com> wrote:
<snip>
> I was thinking of having maybe Tier0 or a designated Tier1 server be the
> master whois responder, which then re-directs the query to the appropriate
> server for a response.
<snip>
> One possible idea is that updated information is sent from each TLD master
> to the whois master using the RM API. Then only one central point of contact
> runs the whole whois system.

I think it is important to include redundancy in the whois design, so
that if a registrar server crashes, goes offline, the disk is
corrupted/dies, whatever - there is another full copy of the db at the
tier0 server. Some of the current registrars provide no contact method
or page, and others have been somewhat unreliable, service-wise.
Anyway, my point is if the data is worth keeping, we should probably
store it in at least 2 places, plus require backups (maybe a formal
OpenNIC backup server for zonefiles and TLD data, encrypted
per-registrar of course?). I could volunteer a VPS for something like
that.

Another thought - if whois data is served for everyone from a central,
master server (and the registrars just push data/updates to that
server), it forces standardization of the data. It also makes it easy
to notice replication problems between the registrar and the master
server, so they can be resolved.