Unfortunately I didn't find the spare cycles to dive into the rwhois project info, but I think there could be some hidden synergy. Do you have any ideas on this aspect? Well, actually it's quite trivial: - What the RIPE NCC has to do is to implement a new "Topdomain" object, with absolutely minimal information in the database: *td: nl *de: Top level domain for the Netherlands *ws: <server_name>.nl *mb: <either NL-DOMREG or RIPE-NCC> *so: RIPE where the presence of *td would signal to the whois server software that queries for both NL and <domain>.NL must be forwarded to the whois server specified in the *ws attribute. - A top level domain registry has 2 options then: 1) If it can't provide reliable whois service itself (yet): stick to the current situation, feeding the RIPE database with domain objects. Not ideal, since the Domain object in the RIPE database really should disappear, and I'm not the only one who thinks about it that way. 2) Provide its own whois service. This service would be accessible directly or indirectly via 'whois -h whois.ripe.net <domain>'. This whois service should preferably run on the same host that is the primary nameserver for the top level domain, although of course this is not mandatory. The NL whois server is almost finished. In fact it's just a shell script. And of course, once it's finished and works well, I'm willing to give it to other TLD registrars. The script will include notifying the registrar in case of discrepancies between the administration and the zone file, from both of which the script will take its information. Piet