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# RIPE version marten@ripe.net
# 1.1 92/07/24
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This is the RIPE version of the whois client program.
This is intended for European users as it will query a RIPE whois
server by default rather than the US NIC whois server.

There are three compile time selectable algorithms how this 
program finds a RIPE whois server:

RIPE
statically selects whois.ripe.net as server host. This host is the
RIPE NCC server machine with the master copy of the RIPE database.

TOPDOMAIN=\"<top-level-domain>\"
This option will fix the default host to be 
<top-level-domain>-whois.ripe.net, which will point to a secondary 
RIPE whois server serving <top-level-domain>. 
If there is no such secondary server, it will point to whois.ripe.net, 
the default. This option overrules the CLEVER option.

CLEVER- Use a educated guess of the whereabouts of the nearest server
This is done by taking the top-level domain of the current
machine, and looking for a CNAME record for a server with name
<top-level-domain>-whois.ripe.net.
If this machine does not exsist or the current machine's top-level
domain could not be found,it will fall back to whois.ripe.net
the default for this RIPE version of whois

The client program also knows about the -a option which will be sent
to the server. This causes the server to include information from
non-RIPE whois databases in the reply. Currently these are the public
parts of the US NIC and NSFnet databases. Please note that the RIPE 
NCC does not maintain these databases. The information is included for
for your convenience only.
