Our Whois service machine is 96 meg and its A-disk is 175 megabytes. Users should have access to the Whois Exec, but that is optional. If you have Xmenu you can also use Whoshow Exec and Menu. Our directory maintenance procedure automatically sends an initial entry for a new userid to Whois. Several other systems on campus are sending updates too.
Users can change only a few fields in their entries.
We regularly rebuild the file using information from our official University human resources and student databases. The e-mail addresses are kept only by Whois. Early each morning another service machine tells Whois to clean up its directory and rebuild the index files used by Foneserv. Whois accepts requests sent by message or RFC 822-style mail and responds in kind. Note that incoming mail must arrive as simple punch files - Netdata format isn't supported.