Bug #392681 reported a problem of refusing to make a connection to certain whois servers. A patch was included. The whois command distributed with F8 is exhibiting this same behavior to the referenced servers on different networks with and without firewalls. Substituting an old FC3 whois that was laying around at work runs fine.
jwhois-4.0-4.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update jwhois'
updates-testing version fixes my reported problem. Thanks!
jwhois-4.0-4.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.