December 21, 1999 Web posted at: 11:45 a.m. EST (1645 GMT) by Carolyn Duffy Marsan

From...

(IDG) -- Network managers that need to find out who owns a particular Internet domain name can now use a simple, one-step process, thanks to several changes that Network Solutions made to its Web site earlier this week.

For the last two months, network managers had to go to multiple Web sites to find the technical, administrative and billing contacts for registered domain names. This situation confused and annoyed many in the Internet engineering community, who were used to finding all of this information in the central database of registered Internet domain names - called whois - that Network Solutions maintains under contract with the Department of Commerce.

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Officials at Herndon, Va. Network Solutions say the whois glitches were caused by the introduction of competition into the marketplace for registering names in the .com, .net and .org domains. For six years, Network Solutions held an exclusive contract for these services, but then the Clinton Administration decided to open up the market to competition. In November, Network Solutions and the Commerce Department signed a series of contracts that outlined procedures for new companies to offer registration services and granted Network Solutions a four-year contract to keep running the central whois database.

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Under the terms of the deal, the new domain name registrars - seven of which are active - all maintain whois databases of their own that link into a comprehensive whois database run by Network Solutions. However, Network Solutions officials say it took them about eight weeks to adjust their central whois database to be able to query the databases run by each of the new registrars. In the interim, users who queried Network Solution's whois database were given just the name of the registrar and then had to make a second query to the registrar's whois database to locate the contact information.

"As of Monday, we have a comprehensive whois with all the contact information, which is how it used to be,'' says Ben Turner, vice president and deputy general manager for the registrar business at Network Solutions. "Over the last six to eight weeks, we got quite a few questions from the trademark community and the technical community about why whois wasn't working the way it used to."

Earlier this week, a number of messages were posted to the Internet Engineering Task Force's main mailing list with questions about Network Solution's whois database.

"We noticed this situation several weeks ago when we were trying to track down where different domain names came from,'' says Jon Backstrom, an Internet engineer for Meredith in Iowa. "Then we figured out we had to run a generalized whois query with Network Solutions and then run a second whois query with the particular registrar. So it was two steps instead of one.''

Backstrom manages 130 domain names for Meredith, publishers of Better Homes and Gardens and other popular magazines. Although he says the whois situation wasn't "a huge problem,'' he admitted it was "kind of strange when we couldn't find the domain information.''

Backstrom ended up finding the information at a Web site called betterwhois.com, one of several third-party whois databases that offer comprehensive domain name searching with a single query.

Network Solutions Monday reinstated comprehensive whois searching along with unveiling a new interface to the company's Web site. The goal of the redesign was to create an easier-to-use site for novices.

"In the past, a lot of the people that used our site were Webmasters and system administrators,'' Turner says. "But as the Internet matures, we're getting a bigger and bigger group of customers that don't have a technical background and don't know what [Domain Name Server] is. So we redid our Web site for them.''

The new Web site - www.networksolutions.com - follows a shopping cart model and lets users choose from a range of domain name services including a regular two-year name registration, an option that includes Web hosting, and an option that includes Web hosting and e-mail.