gwhois is a generic whois client. It strives to know for all existing
tlds and all ip address range the appropiate whois server to ask. You
can simple call gwhois with a query for some domain or some ip and it
will ask the right server for you! It can even query webforms which
are unfortunately the only query type supported by many bad nics.

gwhois can also be used as a whois server. You can call it from the
inetd and make it accessable via a normal standard whois client. This
allows for example using a windows client and still make use of the
enhanced features of gwhois.

WWW: http://freshmeat.net/projects/gwhois/