Misplaced Pages

#633366

105-565: Whois is also the name of the command-line utility on most UNIX systems used to make WHOIS protocol queries. In addition, WHOIS has a sister protocol called Referral Whois ( RWhois ). Elizabeth Feinler and her team (who had created the Resource Directory for ARPANET ) were responsible for creating the first WHOIS directory in the early 1970s. Feinler set up a server in Stanford's Network Information Center (NIC) which acted as

210-518: A full-stop (period) to the query name returns all entries beginning with the query name. On the modern Internet, WHOIS services are typically communicated using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Servers listen to requests on the well-known port number 43. Clients are simple applications that establish a communications channel to the server, transmit a text record with the name of the resource to be queried and await

315-429: A time-sharing configuration, as well as portability. Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: the use of plain text for storing data; a hierarchical file system ; treating devices and certain types of inter-process communication (IPC) as files; and the use of a large number of software tools , small programs that can be strung together through a command-line interpreter using pipes , as opposed to using

420-484: A time-sharing operating system for the GE 645 mainframe computer. Multics featured several innovations , but also presented severe problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics, but not by its goals, individual researchers at Bell Labs started withdrawing from the project. The last to leave were Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , Douglas McIlroy , and Joe Ossanna , who decided to reimplement their experiences in

525-519: A 1999 interview, Dennis Ritchie voiced his opinion that Linux and BSD Unix operating systems are a continuation of the basis of the Unix design and are derivatives of Unix: I think the Linux phenomenon is quite delightful, because it draws so strongly on the basis that Unix provided. Linux seems to be among the healthiest of the direct Unix derivatives, though there are also the various BSD systems as well as

630-643: A WHOIS client takes the user input and then opens an Internet socket to its destination server. The WHOIS protocol manages the transmission of the query and reception of results. With the advent of the World Wide Web and especially the loosening up of the Network Solutions monopoly, looking up WHOIS information via the web has become quite common. At present, popular web-based WHOIS-queries may be conducted from ARIN , RIPE and APNIC . Most early web-based WHOIS clients were merely front-ends to

735-459: A WHOIS database, the thick and the thin model. WHOIS information can be stored and looked up according to either a thick or a thin data model: The thick model usually ensures consistent data and slightly faster queries, since only one WHOIS server needs to be contacted. If a registrar goes out of business, a thick registry contains all important information (if the registrant entered correct data, and privacy features were not used to obscure

840-510: A charter that describes its focus; and what it is expected to produce, and when. It is open to all who want to participate and holds discussions on an open mailing list . Working groups hold open sessions at IETF meetings, where the onsite registration fee in 2024 was between US$ 875 (early registration) and $ 1200 per person for the week. Significant discounts are available for students and remote participants. As working groups do not make decisions at IETF meetings, with all decisions taken later on

945-480: A command-line client, where the resulting output just gets displayed on a web page with little, if any, clean-up or formatting. Currently, web based WHOIS clients usually perform the WHOIS queries directly and then format the results for display. Many such clients are proprietary, authored by domain name registrars. The need for web-based clients came from the fact that command-line WHOIS clients largely existed only in

1050-460: A convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmers. The system grew larger as the operating system started spreading in academic circles, and as users added their own tools to the system and shared them with colleagues. At first, Unix was not designed to support multi-tasking or to be portable . Later, Unix gradually gained multi-tasking and multi-user capabilities in

1155-674: A cooperative agreement, No. NCR-8820945, wherein CNRI agreed to create and provide a "secretariat" for the "overall coordination, management and support of the work of the IAB, its various task forces and, particularly, the IETF". In 1992, CNRI supported the formation and early funding of the Internet Society, which took on the IETF as a fiscally sponsored project, along with the IAB, the IRTF, and

SECTION 10

#1732783402634

1260-496: A directory that could retrieve relevant information about people or entities. She and the team created domains , with Feinler's suggestion that domains be divided into categories based on the physical address of the computer. The process of registration was established in RFC   920 . WHOIS was standardized in the early 1980s to look up domains, people, and other resources related to domain and number registrations. As all registration

1365-510: A generic term such as system to help avoid the creation of a genericized trademark . Internet Engineering Task Force Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: The Internet Engineering Task Force ( IETF ) is a standards organization for

1470-399: A given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with. Since the advent of the commercialized Internet, multiple registrars and unethical spammers, such permissive searching is no longer available. On December 1, 1999, management of the top-level domains (TLDs) com , net , and org was assigned to ICANN . At the time, these TLDs were converted to

1575-420: A large number of retail registrars, who in turn offer them to consumers. For private registration, only the identity of the wholesale registrar may be returned. In this case, the identity of the individual as well as the retail registrar may be hidden. Below is an example of WHOIS data returned for an individual resource holder. This is the result of a WHOIS query of example.com : Referral Whois ( RWhois )

1680-405: A new project of smaller scale. This new operating system was initially without organizational backing, and also without a name. The new operating system was a single-tasking system. In 1970, the group coined the name Unics for Uniplexed Information and Computing Service as a pun on Multics , which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services . Brian Kernighan takes credit for

1785-516: A phrase given as an argument directly to the WHOIS server. Various free open source examples can still be found on sites such as sourceforge.net. However, most modern WHOIS tools implement command line flags or options, such as the -h option to access a specific server host, but default servers are preconfigured. Additional options may allow control of the port number to connect on, displaying additional debugging data, or changing recursion/referral behavior. Like most TCP/IP client–server applications,

1890-512: A potential universal operating system, suitable for computers of all sizes. The Unix environment and the client–server program model were essential elements in the development of the Internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in networks rather than in individual computers. Both Unix and the C programming language were developed by AT&T and distributed to government and academic institutions, which led to both being ported to

1995-420: A reference directory layout for Unix-like operating systems; it has mainly been used in Linux. The Unix system is composed of several components that were originally packaged together. By including the development environment, libraries, documents and the portable, modifiable source code for all of these components, in addition to the kernel of an operating system, Unix was a self-contained software system. This

2100-504: A representation like Un*x , *NIX , or *N?X is used to indicate all operating systems similar to Unix. This comes from the use of the asterisk ( * ) and the question mark characters as wildcard indicators in many utilities. This notation is also used to describe other Unix-like systems that have not met the requirements for UNIX branding from the Open Group. The Open Group requests that UNIX always be used as an adjective followed by

2205-449: A set of cultural norms for developing software, norms which became as important and influential as the technology of Unix itself; this has been termed the Unix philosophy . The TCP/IP networking protocols were quickly implemented on the Unix versions widely used on relatively inexpensive computers, which contributed to the Internet explosion of worldwide, real-time connectivity and formed

SECTION 20

#1732783402634

2310-487: A single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality. These concepts are collectively known as the " Unix philosophy ". Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike summarize this in The Unix Programming Environment as "the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves". By the early 1980s, users began seeing Unix as

2415-544: A single nine-track magnetic tape , earning its reputation as a portable system. The printed documentation, typeset from the online sources, was contained in two volumes. The names and filesystem locations of the Unix components have changed substantially across the history of the system. Nonetheless, the V7 implementation has the canonical early structure: The Unix system had a significant impact on other operating systems. It achieved its reputation by its interactivity, by providing

2520-493: A thin WHOIS model. Existing WHOIS clients stopped working at that time. A month later, it had self-detecting Common Gateway Interface support so that the same program could operate a web-based WHOIS lookup, and an external TLD table to support multiple WHOIS servers based on the TLD of the request. This eventually became the model of the modern WHOIS client. By 2005, there were many more generic top-level domains than there had been in

2625-479: A uniform interface, but at the expense of occasionally requiring additional mechanisms such as ioctl and mode flags to access features of the hardware that did not fit the simple "stream of bytes" model. The Plan 9 operating system pushed this model even further and eliminated the need for additional mechanisms. Unix also popularized the hierarchical file system with arbitrarily nested subdirectories, originally introduced by Multics. Other common operating systems of

2730-508: A versatile document preparation system, and an efficient file system featuring sophisticated access control, mountable and de-mountable volumes, and a unified treatment of peripherals as special files ." The latter permitted the Network Control Program (NCP) to be integrated within the Unix file system, treating network connections as special files that could be accessed through standard Unix I/O calls , which included

2835-402: A wider variety of machine families than any other operating system. The Unix operating system consists of many libraries and utilities along with the master control program, the kernel . The kernel provides services to start and stop programs, handles the file system and other common "low-level" tasks that most programs share, and schedules access to avoid conflicts when programs try to access

2940-767: Is a family of multitasking , multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie , and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System , AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD ), Microsoft ( Xenix ), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS / Solaris ), HP / HPE ( HP-UX ), and IBM ( AIX ). Early versions of Unix ran on PDP-11 computers; Unix

3045-421: Is also standardizing protocols for autonomic networking that enables networks to be self managing. It is a network of physical objects or things that are embedded with electronics, sensors, software and also enables objects to exchange data with operator, manufacturer and other connected devices. Several IETF working groups are developing protocols that are directly relevant to IoT . Its development provides

3150-547: Is an extension of the original WHOIS protocol and service. RWhois extends the concepts of WHOIS in a scalable , hierarchical fashion, potentially creating a system with a tree-like architecture. Queries are deterministically routed to servers based on hierarchical labels, reducing a query to the primary repository of information. Lookups of IP address allocations are often limited to the larger Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) blocks (e.g., /24, /22, /16), because usually only

3255-700: Is available from these statistics. The IETF chairperson is selected by the NomCom process for a two-year renewable term. Before 1993, the IETF Chair was selected by the IAB. A list of the past and current chairs of the IETF: The IETF works on a broad range of networking technologies which provide foundation for the Internet's growth and evolution. It aims to improve the efficiency in management of networks as they grow in size and complexity. The IETF

WHOIS - Misplaced Pages Continue

3360-927: Is not to be confused with the Number Resource Organization 's (NRO) Team of the same name "Consolidated RIR IANA Stewardship Proposal Team" (CRISP Team). In 2013, the IETF acknowledged that IRIS had not been a successful replacement for WHOIS. The primary technical reason for that appeared to be the complexity of IRIS. Further, non-technical reasons were deemed to lie in areas upon which the IETF does not pass judgment. Meanwhile, ARIN and RIPE NCC managed to serve WHOIS data via RESTful web services . The charter (drafted in February 2012) provided for separate specifications, for number registries first and for name registries to follow. The working group produced five proposed standard documents: and an informational document: The WHOIS protocol had its origin in

3465-598: Is on implementing code that will improve standards in terms of quality and interoperability. The details of IETF operations have changed considerably as the organization has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of proposed specifications, development based on the proposals, review and independent testing by participants, and republication as a revised proposal, a draft proposal, or eventually as an Internet Standard. IETF standards are developed in an open, all-inclusive process in which any interested individual can participate. All IETF documents are freely available over

3570-452: Is on the IETF meetings page. The IETF strives to hold its meetings near where most of the IETF volunteers are located. IETF meetings are held three times a year, with one meeting each in Asia, Europe and North America. An occasional exploratory meeting is held outside of those regions in place of one of the other regions. The IETF also organizes hackathons during the IETF meetings. The focus

3675-569: Is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF. The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) oversees the IETF's external relationships. The IAB provides long-range technical direction for Internet development. The IAB also manages

3780-561: Is responsible for day-to-day management of the IETF. It receives appeals of the decisions of the working groups, and the IESG makes the decision to progress documents in the standards track . The chair of the IESG is the area director of the general area, who also serves as the overall IETF chair. Members of the IESG include the two directors, sometimes three, of each of the following areas: Liaison and ex officio members include: The Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures (GADS) Task Force

3885-782: The GNU Compiler Collection (and the rest of the GNU toolchain ), the GNU C library and the GNU Core Utilities  – have gone on to play central roles in other free Unix systems as well. Linux distributions , consisting of the Linux kernel and large collections of compatible software have become popular both with individual users and in business. Popular distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux , Fedora , SUSE Linux Enterprise , openSUSE , Debian , Ubuntu , Linux Mint , Slackware Linux , Arch Linux and Gentoo . A free derivative of BSD Unix, 386BSD ,

3990-709: The IETF Tools site . As of March 2009, the CRISP IETF Working Group concluded, after a final RFC 5144 was published by the group Newton, Andrew; Sanz, Marcos (February 2008). A Domain Availability Check (DCHK) Registry Type for the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) . IETF . doi : 10.17487/RFC5144 . RFC 5144 . Retrieved 1 June 2015 . . Note : The IETF CRISP working group

4095-467: The Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and all its participants are volunteers. Their work is usually funded by employers or other sponsors. The IETF was initially supported by the federal government of the United States but since 1993 has operated under the auspices of

4200-635: The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations. A nominating committee (NomCom) of ten randomly chosen volunteers who participate regularly at meetings, a non-voting chair and 4-5 liaisons, is vested with the power to appoint, reappoint, and remove members of the IESG, IAB, IETF Trust and the IETF LLC. To date, no one has been removed by a NomCom, although several people have resigned their positions, requiring replacements. In 1993

4305-468: The Internet Society , a non-profit organization with local chapters around the world. There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone can participate by signing up to a working group mailing list, or registering for an IETF meeting. The IETF operates in a bottom-up task creation mode, largely driven by working groups. Each working group normally has appointed two co-chairs (occasionally three);

WHOIS - Misplaced Pages Continue

4410-592: The Internet service provider responsible for a particular resource. The records of each of these registries are cross-referenced, so that a query to ARIN for a record which belongs to RIPE will return a placeholder pointing to the RIPE WHOIS server. This lets the WHOIS user making the query know that the detailed information resides on the RIPE server. In addition to the RIRs servers, commercial services exist, such as

4515-534: The Routing Assets Database used by some large networks (e.g., large Internet providers that acquired other ISPs in several RIR areas). There is currently no widely extended way for determining the responsible WHOIS server for a DNS domain, though a number of methods are in common use for top-level domains (TLDs). Some registries use DNS SRV records (defined in RFC 2782) to allow clients to discover

4620-586: The UNIX 98 or UNIX 03 trademarks today, after the operating system's vendor pays a substantial certification fee and annual trademark royalties to The Open Group. Systems that have been licensed to use the UNIX trademark include AIX , EulerOS , HP-UX , Inspur K-UX , IRIX , macOS , Solaris , Tru64 UNIX (formerly "Digital UNIX", or OSF/1 ), and z/OS . Notably, EulerOS and Inspur K-UX are Linux distributions certified as UNIX 03 compliant. Sometimes

4725-436: The regional Internet registries (RIRs) and domain registrars run RWhois or WHOIS servers, although RWhois is intended to be run by even smaller local Internet registries , to provide more granular information about IP address assignment. RWhois is intended to replace WHOIS, providing an organized hierarchy of referral services where one could connect to any RWhois server, request a look-up and be automatically re-directed to

4830-753: The ARPANET NICNAME protocol and was based on the NAME/FINGER Protocol , described in RFC   742 (1977). The NICNAME/WHOIS protocol was first described in RFC   812 in 1982 by Ken Harrenstien and Vic White of the Network Information Center at SRI International . WHOIS was originally implemented on the Network Control Protocol (NCP) but found its major use when the TCP/IP suite

4935-632: The ARPANET became the Internet during the 1980s. UUNET began offering domain registration service; however, they simply handled the paperwork which they forwarded to the DARPA Network Information Center (NIC). Then the National Science Foundation directed that commercial, third-party entities would handle the management of Internet domain registration. InterNIC was formed in 1993 under contract with

5040-525: The IETF changed from an activity supported by the US federal government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society , a US-based 501(c)(3) organization . In 2018 the Internet Society created a subsidiary, the IETF Administration LLC, to be the corporate, legal and financial home for the IETF. IETF activities are funded by meeting fees, meeting sponsors and by

5145-620: The ISOC's board of directors. In 2018, ISOC established The IETF Administration LLC, a separate LLC to handle the administration of the IETF. In 2019, the LLC issued a call for proposals to provide secretariat services to the IETF. The first IETF meeting was attended by 21 US federal government-funded researchers on 16 January 1986. It was a continuation of the work of the earlier GADS Task Force. Representatives from non-governmental entities (such as gateway vendors ) were invited to attend starting with

5250-644: The Internet Society via its organizational membership and the proceeds of the Public Interest Registry . In December 2005, the IETF Trust was established to manage the copyrighted materials produced by the IETF. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) is a body composed of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) chair and area directors. It provides the final technical review of Internet standards and

5355-481: The Internet Standards process, the Internet Standards or their technical content". In 1998, CNRI established Foretec Seminars, Inc. (Foretec), a for-profit subsidiary to take over providing secretariat services to the IETF. Foretec provided these services until at least 2004. By 2013, Foretec was dissolved. In 2003, IETF's RFC  3677 described IETFs role in appointing three board members to

SECTION 50

#1732783402634

5460-588: The Internet and can be reproduced at will. Multiple, working, useful, interoperable implementations are the chief requirement before an IETF proposed specification can become a standard. Most specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly interlocked systems. This has allowed the protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP IMS ). Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code" as its touchstone, results can be slow whenever

5565-489: The NSF, consisting of Network Solutions, Inc. , General Atomics and AT&T . The General Atomics contract was canceled after several years due to performance issues. 20th-century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for

5670-487: The Open Group Base Specification. In 1999, in an effort towards compatibility, several Unix system vendors agreed on SVR4's Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) as the standard for binary and object code files. The common format allows substantial binary compatibility among different Unix systems operating on the same CPU architecture. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard was created to provide

5775-491: The UNIX trademark to The Open Group , an industry consortium founded in 1996. The Open Group allows the use of the mark for certified operating systems that comply with the Single UNIX Specification (SUS). Unix-like operating systems have been relevant since the 1990s which function similarly to Unix: popular examples are GNU (including Linux ), FreeBSD and macOS . Unix was originally meant to be

5880-629: The Unix and large computing worlds. Microsoft Windows and Macintosh computers had no WHOIS clients installed by default, so registrars had to find a way to provide access to WHOIS data for potential customers. Many end-users still rely on such clients, even though command line and graphical clients exist now for most home PC platforms. Microsoft provides the Sysinternals Suite that includes a whois client at no cost. CPAN has several Perl modules available that work with WHOIS servers. Many of them are not current and do not fully function with

5985-426: The WHOIS information system were command-line interface tools for Unix and Unix-like operating systems (i.e. Solaris, Linux etc.). WHOIS client and server software is distributed as free open-source software and binary distributions are included with all Unix-like systems. Various commercial Unix implementations may use a proprietary implementation (for example, Solaris 7). A WHOIS command line client passes

6090-632: The added benefit of closing all connections on program exit, should the user neglect to do so. In order "to minimize the amount of code added to the basic Unix kernel ", much of the NCP code ran in a swappable user process, running only when needed. In October 1993, Novell , the company that owned the rights to the Unix System V source at the time, transferred the trademarks of Unix to the X/Open Company (now The Open Group ), and in 1995 sold

6195-436: The address of the WHOIS server. Some WHOIS lookups require searching the procuring domain registrar to display domain owner details. Normally the contact information of the resources assignee is returned. However, some registrars offer private registration, in which case the contact information of the registrar is shown instead. Some registry operators are wholesalers, meaning that they typically provide domain name services to

6300-465: The basis for a widely implemented operating system interface standard (POSIX, see above). The C programming language soon spread beyond Unix, and is now ubiquitous in systems and applications programming. Early Unix developers were important in bringing the concepts of modularity and reusability into software engineering practice, spawning a "software tools" movement. Over time, the leading developers of Unix (and programs that ran on it) established

6405-435: The basis for implementations on many other platforms. The Unix policy of extensive on-line documentation and (for many years) ready access to all system source code raised programmer expectations, and contributed to the launch of the free software movement in 1983. In 1983, Richard Stallman announced the GNU (short for "GNU's Not Unix") project, an ambitious effort to create a free software Unix-like system—"free" in

SECTION 60

#1732783402634

6510-492: The command interpreter an ordinary user-level program, with additional commands provided as separate programs, was another Multics innovation popularized by Unix. The Unix shell used the same language for interactive commands as for scripting ( shell scripts  – there was no separate job control language like IBM's JCL ). Since the shell and OS commands were "just another program", the user could choose (or even write) their own shell. New commands could be added without changing

6615-479: The core of the Mac OS X operating system, later renamed macOS . Unix-like operating systems are widely used in modern servers , workstations , and mobile devices . In the late 1980s, an open operating system standardization effort now known as POSIX provided a common baseline for all operating systems; IEEE based POSIX around the common structure of the major competing variants of the Unix system, publishing

6720-545: The correct server(s). However, while the technical functionality is in place, adoption of the RWhois standard has been weak. RWhois services are typically communicated using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). Servers listen to requests on the well-known port number 4321. Rwhois was first specified in RFC   1714 in 1994 by Network Solutions , but the specification was superseded in 1997 by RFC   2167 . The referral features of RWhois are different than

6825-441: The current (2005) WHOIS server infrastructure. However, there is still much useful functionality to derive including looking up AS numbers and registrant contacts. WHOIS services are mainly run by registrars and registries ; for example the Public Interest Registry (PIR) maintains the .ORG registry and associated WHOIS service. WHOIS servers operated by regional Internet registries (RIR) can be queried directly to determine

6930-416: The data) and registration information can be retained. But with a thin registry, the contact information might not be available, and it could be difficult for the rightful registrant to retain control of the domain. If a WHOIS client did not understand how to deal with this situation, it would display the full information from the registrar. The WHOIS protocol has no standard for determining how to distinguish

7035-507: The early 1980s. There are also many more country-code top-level domains. This has led to a complex network of domain name registrars and registrar associations, especially as the management of Internet infrastructure has become more internationalized. As such, performing a WHOIS query on a domain requires knowing the correct, authoritative WHOIS server to use. Tools to do WHOIS domain searches have become common and are offered by providers such as IONOS and Namecheap. In 2003, an IETF committee

7140-546: The era had ways to divide a storage device into multiple directories or sections, but they had a fixed number of levels, often only one level. Several major proprietary operating systems eventually added recursive subdirectory capabilities also patterned after Multics. DEC's RSX-11M 's "group, user" hierarchy evolved into OpenVMS directories, CP/M 's volumes evolved into MS-DOS 2.0+ subdirectories, and HP's MPE group.account hierarchy and IBM's SSP and OS/400 library systems were folded into broader POSIX file systems. Making

7245-470: The event a deficit occurs, CNRI has agreed to contribute up to USD$ 102,000 to offset it." In 1993, Cerf continued to support the formation of ISOC while working for CNRI, and the role of ISOC in "the official procedures for creating and documenting Internet Standards" was codified in the IETF's RFC   1602 . In 1995, IETF's RFC  2031 describes ISOC's role in the IETF as being purely administrative, and ISOC as having "no influence whatsoever on

7350-549: The feature of a WHOIS server to refer responses to another server, which RWhois also implements. One criticism of WHOIS is the lack of full access to the data. Few parties have realtime access to the complete databases. UNIX Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating the Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: Unix ( / ˈ j uː n ɪ k s / , YOO -niks ; trademarked as UNIX )

7455-679: The first POSIX standard in 1988. In the early 1990s, a separate but very similar effort was started by an industry consortium, the Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative, which eventually became the Single UNIX Specification (SUS) administered by The Open Group . Starting in 1998, the Open Group and IEEE started the Austin Group , to provide a common definition of POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, which, by 2008, had become

7560-459: The fourth IETF meeting in October 1986. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to the public. Initially, the IETF met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting three times a year. The initial meetings were very small, with fewer than 35 people in attendance at each of the first five meetings. The maximum attendance during the first 13 meetings was only 120 attendees. This occurred at

7665-420: The idea, but adds that "no one can remember" the origin of the final spelling Unix . Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Peter G. Neumann also credit Kernighan. The operating system was originally written in assembly language , but in 1973, Version 4 Unix was rewritten in C . Version 4 Unix, however, still had much PDP-11 specific code, and was not suitable for porting. The first port to another platform

7770-476: The late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to large-scale adoption of Unix ( BSD and System V ) by commercial startups, which in turn led to Unix fragmenting into multiple, similar — but often slightly and mutually incompatible — systems including DYNIX , HP-UX , SunOS / Solaris , AIX , and Xenix . In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4 ( SVR4 ), which

7875-428: The modular design of the Unix model, sharing components is relatively common: most or all Unix and Unix-like systems include at least some BSD code, while some include GNU utilities in their distributions. Linux and BSD Unix are increasingly filling market needs traditionally served by proprietary Unix operating systems, expanding into new markets such as the consumer desktop , mobile devices and embedded devices . In

7980-443: The more official offerings from the workstation and mainframe manufacturers. In the same interview, he states that he views both Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others, many years ago". OpenSolaris was the free software counterpart to Solaris developed by Sun Microsystems , which included a CDDL -licensed kernel and a primarily GNU userland. However, Oracle discontinued

8085-423: The number of volunteers is either too small to make progress, or so large as to make consensus difficult, or when volunteers lack the necessary expertise. For protocols like SMTP , which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change that is not fully backward compatible , except for IPv6 . Work within the IETF on ways to improve

8190-475: The operating system should provide a set of simple tools, each of which performs a limited, well-defined function. A unified and inode -based filesystem and an inter-process communication mechanism known as " pipes " serve as the main means of communication, and a shell scripting and command language (the Unix shell ) is used to combine the tools to perform complex workflows. In the early 1990s, AT&T sold its rights in Unix to Novell , which then sold

8295-419: The organization of annual INET meetings. Gross continued to serve as IETF chair throughout this transition. Cerf, Kahn, and Lyman Chapin announced the formation of ISOC as "a professional society to facilitate, support, and promote the evolution and growth of the Internet as a global research communications infrastructure". At the first board meeting of the Internet Society, Cerf, representing CNRI, offered, "In

8400-503: The original version of Unix – the entire system was configured using textual shell command scripts. The common denominator in the I/O system was the byte – unlike "record-based" file systems . The focus on text for representing nearly everything made Unix pipes especially useful and encouraged the development of simple, general tools that could easily be combined to perform more complicated ad hoc tasks. The focus on text and bytes made

8505-599: The project upon their acquisition of Sun, which prompted a group of former Sun employees and members of the OpenSolaris community to fork OpenSolaris into the illumos kernel. As of 2014, illumos remains the only active, open-source System V derivative. In May 1975, RFC 681 described the development of Network Unix by the Center for Advanced Computation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign . The Unix system

8610-506: The registry's policies. WHOIS lookups were traditionally performed with a command line interface application, but now many alternative web-based tools exist. A WHOIS database consists of a set of text records for each resource. These text records consists of various items of information about the resource itself, and any associated information of assignees, registrants, administrative information, such as creation and expiration dates. Two data models exist for storing resource information in

8715-591: The related business operations to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO). Whether Novell also sold the copyrights to the actual software was the subject of a federal lawsuit in 2006, SCO v. Novell , which Novell won. The case was appealed, but on August 30, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed the trial decisions, closing the case. Unix vendor SCO Group Inc. accused Novell of slander of title . The present owner of

8820-499: The response in form of a sequence of text records found in the database. This simplicity of the protocol also permits an application, and a command line interface user, to query a WHOIS server using the Telnet protocol. In 2014, June ICANN published the recommendation for status codes, the "Extensible Provisioning Protocol ( EPP ) domain status codes" Once deletion occurs, the domain is available for re-registration in accordance with

8925-482: The same resource or device simultaneously. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the distinction of kernel space from user space , the latter being a lower priority realm where most application programs operate. The origins of Unix date back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Bell Labs , and General Electric were developing Multics ,

9030-535: The sense that everyone who received a copy would be free to use, study, modify, and redistribute it. The GNU project's own kernel development project, GNU Hurd , had not yet produced a working kernel, but in 1991 Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel as free software under the GNU General Public License . In addition to their use in the GNU operating system, many GNU packages – such as

9135-427: The shell itself. Unix's innovative command-line syntax for creating modular chains of producer-consumer processes ( pipelines ) made a powerful programming paradigm ( coroutines ) widely available. Many later command-line interpreters have been inspired by the Unix shell. A fundamental simplifying assumption of Unix was its focus on newline - delimited text for nearly all file formats. There were no "binary" editors in

9240-654: The software at a nominal fee for educational use, by running on inexpensive hardware, and by being easy to adapt and move to different machines. Unix was originally written in assembly language , but was soon rewritten in C , a high-level programming language . Although this followed the lead of CTSS , Multics and Burroughs MCP , it was Unix that popularized the idea. Unix had a drastically simplified file model compared to many contemporary operating systems: treating all kinds of files as simple byte arrays. The file system hierarchy contained machine services and devices (such as printers , terminals , or disk drives ), providing

9345-525: The speed of the standards-making process is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus on improvements has been slow to develop. The IETF cooperates with the W3C , ISO / IEC , ITU , and other standards bodies. Statistics are available that show who the top contributors by RFC publication are. While the IETF only allows for participation by individuals, and not by corporations or governments, sponsorship information

9450-418: The system far more scalable and portable than other systems. Over time, text-based applications have also proven popular in application areas, such as printing languages ( PostScript , ODF ), and at the application layer of the Internet protocols , e.g., FTP , SMTP , HTTP , SOAP , and SIP . Unix popularized a syntax for regular expressions that found widespread use. The Unix programming interface became

9555-455: The thin model from the thick model. Specific details of which records are stored vary among domain name registries . Some top-level domains , including com and net , operate a thin WHOIS, requiring domain registrars to maintain their own customers' data. The other global top-level registries, including org , operate a thick model. Each country-code top-level registry has its own national rules. The first applications written for

9660-459: The trademark UNIX is The Open Group, an industry standards consortium. Only systems fully compliant with and certified to the Single UNIX Specification qualify as "UNIX" (others are called " Unix-like "). By decree of The Open Group, the term "UNIX" refers more to a class of operating systems than to a specific implementation of an operating system; those operating systems which meet The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification should be able to bear

9765-543: The twelfth meeting, held during January 1989. These meetings have grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 1990s; it had a maximum attendance of 2810 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, California . Attendance declined with industry restructuring during the early 2000s, and is currently around 1200. The locations for IETF meetings vary greatly. A list of past and future meeting locations

9870-490: The working group mailing list , meeting attendance is not required for contributors. Rough consensus is the primary basis for decision making. There are no formal voting procedures. Each working group is intended to complete work on its topic and then disband. In some cases, the working group will instead have its charter updated to take on new tasks as appropriate. The working groups are grouped into areas by subject matter ( see § Steering group , below ). Each area

9975-573: Was Mike Corrigan, who was then the technical program manager for the Defense Data Network (DDN). Also in 1986, after leaving DARPA, Robert E. Kahn founded the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), which began providing administrative support to the IETF. In 1987, Corrigan was succeeded as IETF chair by Phill Gross. Effective March 1, 1989, but providing support dating back to late 1988, CNRI and NSF entered into

10080-536: Was a port of Version 6, made four years later (1977) at the University of Wollongong for the Interdata 7/32 , followed by a Bell Labs port of Version 7 to the Interdata 8/32 during 1977 and 1978. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are collectively referred to as Research Unix . In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to Donald B. Gillies at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) Department of Computer Science. During

10185-431: Was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language , which allows Unix to operate on numerous platforms. Unix systems are characterized by a modular design that is sometimes called the " Unix philosophy ". According to this philosophy,

10290-547: Was done by one organization at that time, one centralized server was used for WHOIS queries. This made looking up such information very easy. At the time of the emergence of the internet from the ARPANET, the only organization that handled all domain registrations was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the United States government (created during 1958.). The responsibility of domain registration remained with DARPA as

10395-402: Was formed to create a new standard for looking up information on domain names and network numbers: Cross Registry Information Service Protocol (CRISP). Between January 2005 and July 2006, the working name for this proposed new standard was Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) The initial IETF Proposed Standards RFCs for IRIS are: The status of RFCs this group worked on can be found on

10500-402: Was one of the key reasons it emerged as an important teaching and learning tool and has had a broad influence. See § Impact , below. The inclusion of these components did not make the system large – the original V7 UNIX distribution, consisting of copies of all of the compiled binaries plus all of the source code and documentation occupied less than 10 MB and arrived on

10605-573: Was released in 1992 and led to the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects. With the 1994 settlement of a lawsuit brought against the University of California and Berkeley Software Design Inc. ( USL v. BSDi ) by Unix System Laboratories , it was clarified that Berkeley had the right to distribute BSD Unix for free if it so desired. Since then, BSD Unix has been developed in several different product branches, including OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD . Because of

10710-516: Was said to "present several interesting capabilities as an ARPANET mini-host". At the time, Unix required a license from Bell Telephone Laboratories that cost US$ 20,000 for non-university institutions, while universities could obtain a license for a nominal fee of $ 150. It was noted that Bell was "open to suggestions" for an ARPANET-wide license. The RFC specifically mentions that Unix "offers powerful local processing facilities in terms of user programs, several compilers , an editor based on QED ,

10815-425: Was standardized across the ARPANET and later the Internet. The protocol specification is the following (original quote): The command line server query is normally a single name specification. i.e. the name of a resource. However, servers accept a query, consisting of only the question mark (?) to return a description of acceptable command line formats. Substitution or wild-card formats also exist, e.g., appending

10920-404: Was subsequently adopted by many commercial Unix vendors. In the 1990s, Unix and Unix-like systems grew in popularity and became the operating system of choice for over 90% of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers , as BSD and Linux distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers. In 2000, Apple released Darwin , also a Unix system, which became

11025-588: Was the precursor to the IETF. Its chairman was David L. Mills of the University of Delaware . In January 1986, the Internet Activities Board (IAB; now called the Internet Architecture Board) decided to divide GADS into two entities: an Internet Architecture (INARC) Task Force chaired by Mills to pursue research goals, and the IETF to handle nearer-term engineering and technology transfer issues. The first IETF chair

#633366