I hate the new mail system

[Pete Turnbull]

On 07/03/2017 09:57, Christian Corti via cctalk wrote:
> And BTW, what you are doing is not clever at all:
>   mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG
>     SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection:
>     host MX-4.rodents-montreal.org [98.124.61.89]:
>     550-.de's whois server, whois.denic.de, is completely broken, handing
>     550-out no contact information at all when queried for .de domains in
>     550 the usual way.  Such a domain has no place on a civilized network.
>
> This is just wrong. Of course they hand out contact information!
> Sorry, I had to post it here since I cannot contact you directly.

No, Mouse is right, it's broken:

$ whois uni-stuttgart.de
% Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified
$ whois -h whois.denic.de uni-stuttgart.de
% Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified
$

So then I try this:

$ telnet whois.denic.de 43
Trying 81.91.170.6...
Connected to whois.denic.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
help
% SYNTAX: whois [-r] [-T types] [-C charset] key
%
% where our server understands the following options:
%
% -r                      turn off recursive lookups (default: on)
% -T ace                  ACE input for domain lookup
% -T domain (dn)          only look for objects of type domain
% -T status (st)          only look for domain status
% -C charset              specify character set for the input/output
%                         Available charsets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, 
UTF-8 (default)
%
% NOTE: Read the detailed documentation for valid argument combinations. 
There are two special queries
%
% [?, HELP, help]         displays this text
% alive at whois             returns 'alive' if whois server runs properly
%
% Detailed documentation under https://www.denic.de/webwhois/?lang=en
%
Connection closed by foreign host.
$

So far, so good.  The server's alive (yes, I also tried the 
"alive at whois" command).  But:

$ telnet whois.denic.de 43
Trying 81.91.170.6...
Connected to whois.denic.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
whois -r uni-stuttgart.de
% Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified
Connection closed by foreign host.
$

That's broken.

And there is little helpful documentation about how to query the whois 
service at the URL given in the HELP text.  I eventually found a document at
https://www.denic.de/fileadmin/public/documentation/DENIC-12p_EN.pdf
which describes how to make a whois query of this rather idiosyncratic 
server.  It states that it should work as I tested it - but even 
adopting the example given in that document fails:

$ whois -h whois.denic.de -T status uni-stuttgart.de
% Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified
$
$ telnet whois.denic.de 43
Trying 81.91.170.6...
Connected to whois.denic.de.
Escape character is '^]'.
whois -T status uni-stuttgart.de
% Error: 55000000007 Request not clearly specified
Connection closed by foreign host.
$

Epic fail.

-- 
Pete
Pete Turnbull