fred-mod-whoisd
package mod_whoisd

Overview

Purpose of this package is to translate incomming requests in form of traditional whois request to CORBA requests, which are further processed by central register. And also the way back - translate CORBA responses of central register to whois responses to client. The interface to central register is defined by IDL file.

Specification of whois protocol can be found in README file in source repository.

Module's configuration

List of configuration directives recognized by mod_whoisd:

name: WhoisProtocol

  • value: On, Off
  • default: Off
  • context: global config, virtual host
  • description: Activates whois module for this connection. This means that any data comming from network connection on ip address of virtual host are assummed to be whois requests.

name: WhoisDisclaimer

  • value: PATH
  • default: none
  • context: global config, virtual host
  • description: File containing comment which preceeds every whois response. This argument is mandatory. The file is read only once during startup and then it is cached in memory. Whois comment character '' is prepended to every line automatically by module. Those characters must not be already present in disclaimer file! Otherwise they would be displayed twice.

name: WhoisObject

  • value: alias
  • default: Whois
  • context: global config, virtual host
  • description: Alias under which is exported corba object reference from mod_corba module.

File httpd-whois.conf is example of mod_whoisd's configuration.

Building and installing the module

Module comes with configure script, which should hide differences among Fedora, Gentoo, Debian and Ubuntu linux distributions. Other distribution let alone UNIX-like operating systems where not tested. The following parameters in addition to standard ones are recognized by the configure script:

- --with-idl             Location of IDL file.
.

Following options doesn't have to be ussualy specified since tools' location is automatically found by configure in most cases:

- --with-apr-config      Location of apr-config tool.
- --with-apxs            Location of apxs tool.
- --with-orbit-idl       Location of ORBit IDL compiler.
- --with-pkg-config      Location of pkg-config tool.
- --with-doc             Location of doxygen if you want to generate documentation.
.

The installation directories are not taken into account. The installation directories are given by apxs tool.

The module is installed by the traditional way: ./configure && make && make install. The module is installed in directory where other apache modules reside.

Troubleshooting

There is apache's log file where mod_whoisd puts log messages. If you can't localize error by log and source code inspection there is a test program "whois_test". This binary is easy to debug in gdb and in 80% of cases are the bugs from mod_whoisd reproducible by this simplified binary. If you decided to use gdb, don't forget to configure mod_whoisd with CFLAGS='-g -O0 -Wall'.

The test utility returns just a status for each domain listed on a command line.