This is an experimental implementation of a whois++ service being proposed
by the IETF's WNILS (Whois and Network Information Lookup Service) Working
Group. It uses a (Quipu 8.0 based) X.500 Directory Service as it's
information source.

The whois++ server communicates with the Directory via LDAP (Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol), using the libraries developed by the University
of Michigan. All user search queries are transformed into LDAP queries that
are passed to the X.500 Directory service for resolution.

For "normal" whois style queries we make a number of assumptions on the
attributes of interest depending on the format of the query. If you only
supply a single token it is assumed that you wish to search for a family
name or userid. Multiple tokens imply a search on a full name (commonName
in X.500-speak). We also support e-mail lookups as described in the
original whois RFC (RFC954) however wildcard style searches may be
constrained by the X.500 Directory service.

Example queries 
a. ng =>
	(|(sn=ng)(userid=ng)(l=ng)(ou=ng)(&(cn=ng)(!(objectClass=person))))
b. zhongyi li =>
	(|(l=zhongyi li)(ou=zhongyi li)(preferredName=zhongyi li)\
		(cn=*zhongyi * li))
c. mrp@ =>
	(|(mail=mrp@*)(userid=mrp))

You can also use structured whois++ queries that specify the attribute to
search as well as value. Searching using uncommon attributes attributes may
be restricted by the X.500 Directory system.