Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!rex!wuarchive!udel!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!rain.andrew.cmu.edu!ddean From: ddean@rain.andrew.cmu.edu (Drew Dean) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: NetFind and its Internet load Message-ID: <12943@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 7 May 91 22:24:47 GMT References: <1991May6.173923.174@colorado.edu> Organization: Carnegie Mellon University Lines: 41 There are some interesting points here. If the person you're trying to find has (a) been on the net for a long time, (b) works for the military or a military contractor, or (c) is the technical or administrative contact for a domain, a whois query to nic.ddn.mil will usually get an answer. But yet even relatively well known people such as Ed Vielmetti aren't in that database. Stanford runs a whois server on stanford.edu that has a campus database in, so that's useful if you know a person is there; as Ed points out UMich, MIT, and UIUC; at CMU finger name@andrew.cmu.edu will do the same thing; if you know they're in CS, finger name@cs.cmu.edu will also work. However, most of the net isn't setup like this, although I'd say it would probably be a good thing. If you know where a person is, (and you're lucky :-)), a nice note to postmaster is another reasonable approach. If not, nslookup and fingering main machines (ie. not every workstation in a cluster, just the fileservers & time-sharing machines) will usually work. For those who are SMTP literate, the VRFY command is also worth trying, although certain SMTP servers don't support it. So if a person is in the NIC database, or you know where they are, you can find them without too much work. The big problem is if neither of these cases apply. Would someone like to donate a machine to run a really big whois database ? Even so, you still have aliasing problem; the current whois database at nic.ddn.mil has 2 "Adams, Rick" entries for example. (It gives email addresses and phone numbers for both, so if you (think) you know where they are, it's easy to get the right one, but in this networked age I might not know where they are -- if I can reach them via the net, who cares ?) The NIC (& CMU) solution of 4 character alphanumeric IDs seems a bit impersonal, at best, although I won't complain because I don't have a better idea....:-) This is the case that NetFind may be good for; I haven't seen it so I can't comment. However, if you don't have a good idea where to start, I don't see how it can avoid traversing the country on (costly) backbones -- which is the problem if a lot of people use it. It seems we're no closer than when we started, but with a machine generating the finger's and VRFY's rather than a person. Sigh.... -- Drew Dean Drew_Dean@rain.andrew.cmu.edu [CMU provides my net connection; they don't necessarily agree with me.]