Gopher is an information-delivery system supported by hundreds of server machines throughout the Internet. Typically, each of these machines has certain information stored locally (e.g., in the form of text files), and provides a way for clients to discover and connect to other server machines of interest. Oh, by the way, Gopher originated at the University of Minnesota -- in case you thought it was our idea. The Gopher server that you've just contacted runs on a machine, sipb.mit.edu, operated by the Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neither of which know much of anything about it. The purpose of the server is to allow Gopher users to query the various whois servers on the Internet. See the selection "Internet whois servers" to get started. The Gopher guidelines about "Contacting server administrators" say that we're supposed to provide our address and phone number so you can report operational problems to us. OK, here it is: 84 Massachusetts Avenue Room W20-557 Cambridge, MA 02139 U.S.A. +1 617 253 7788 You can call or write us a letter if you really want to, but we'd prefer that you send e-mail instead. If our server is violating some network protocol, causing your client software to die horribly, or otherwise being particularly antisocial, let us know at bug-sipb@sipb.mit.edu (You could also use "@athena.mit.edu" instead, especially if the problem is that the server's mail system is broken...) Problems with the whois-server information should be reported to: bug-whois@sipb.mit.edu Please don't send questions of the form "Is there a whois server at ?" If our Gopher server has no entry for a certain site, then we don't know of a publicly accessible whois server there. Also, please limit your questions to the topic of whois service. Obviously, there are many organizations on the network that don't operate whois servers; however, we aren't collecting information about those here. .