Make sure you have rpm whois installed AND running the correct binary of whois. There is a second whois binary in the sax2-tools rpm, which seems to be totaly unrelated to the whois command, but gets precedence by $PATH over the exspected whois (neat eh?! ;-)
The exspected whois resides in /usr/bin/whois. Use 'type whois' and 'rpm -qf <path-to-whois>' to check which one you are executing.
Greetings .....Volker
Wow.. this is really WORK.. After I check, i can't use whois whenever i logged as root, but with reg user, i can do whois. In root, 'whois' calls program in sax2-tools (which is i never know it happen.. is sax uses whois ?). And in users, it calls whois in /usr/bin/whois which work as usual. Thanks Volker.. :-) BTW, is there any chance to switch back whois to /usr/bin/whois instead in /usr/sbin/whois ? I mean in default suse.. regards, -- Arie Reynaldi Zanahar reymanx at gmail.com http://www.reynaldi.or.id