whois

[Jeff Lightner]

OK I know this isn't BIND specific but I'm a little confused.
On checking an outbound email going to an address @sas.samsung.com I
wanted to verify that was a real server.   I found I couldn't ping it
and also when going on line I couldn't go to www.samsung.com (that may
be DNS).   I then decided just to do a whois to make sure Samsung.com
was the correct domain.

On attempting that from my Linux (FC4) workstation I found saw the
following:

whois samsung.com
[Querying whois.internic.net]
[Redirected to whois.yesnic.com]
[Querying whois.yesnic.com]
[whois.yesnic.com: Temporary failure in name resolution]
[Unable to connect to remote host]

I get the same sort of response trying whois yesnic.com.

That might make me think it was all just a DNS problem except that it
seems to be restricted to Linux servers in a VLAN dedicated for that
purpose.   Doing whois from HP-UX servers in a different VLAN gives the
correct response.   Doing whois from Linux workstations in another VLN
gives the right answer but then ends in:

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.
getaddrinfo: Temporary failure in name resolution

Also going to the Internic web site as well as dnsstuff.com I find both
able to provide the whois and the latter able to give me A records for
specific items such as the sas.samsung.com.   (I can't ping any
Samsung.com or Yesnic.com sites by name so it appears lookup is failing
but if so why does UNIX work?)

All of this makes it seem that:
A)	I have some trouble resolving items from yesnic.com for itself
and samsung.com
B)	Not all my servers are getting their whois information the same
way.   

I verified the resolv.conf for the hosts were using the same nameservers
to rule that out.   My security admin confirmed our outbound NATed IP
all the servers is the same so it doesn't seem it could be blacklisting.

I've done some reading on whois including the RFC but don't quite get
why I would be getting full results on the UNIX servers, partial results
on the Linux workstation VLAN and no results on the Linux server VLAN.
That is to say I could understand this failing if it simply wasn't
resolving yesnic.com but since some servers are that doesn't seem to be
the whole story.