What mode should `whois' be?

[Barry Shein]

From: earle at smeagol.UUCP (Greg Earle)
>When I run `whois' as root, everything works fine.  When I run `whois' as
>any plain user, I get:
>
>whois: bind: Permission denied

Yes, whois tries to bind the whois socket as provided by /etc/services
(officially 43.) This requires root priviliges, setuid it if you want it
to work.

You also realize, I hope, that by default it is trying to make an
ARPAnet link across to SRI-NIC, so you'll have to be able to route
there (or specify a local server via -h on the command line.)

It's not a bug. It even works when set up properly.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University