Whois Topics

• whois protocol
• whois queries
• whois lookup
• command line interface
• whois server
• ripe server
• top level domains
• rfc 920
• ownership details
• rirs
• centralized server
• large networks
• domain registrars
• global service
• domain ownership
• commercialized
• time one
• system administrators
• tlds
• internet providers

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Whois, Whois

WHOIS lookups were traditionally made using a command line interface, but a number of simplified web-based tools now exist for looking up domain ownership details from different databases. Web-based WHOIS clients still rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups, and command-line WHOIS clients are still quite widely used by system administrators. WHOIS normally runs on TCP port 43.

Other studies that are ongoing concern the accuracy of WHOIS information, and the effectiveness of the processes for reporting inaccurate public WHOIS information.

Some top-level domains, including .com and .net, operate a thin WHOIS, allowing the various domain registrars the ability to maintain their own customers' data. Other registries, including .org, operate a thick model.

This lets the WHOIS user making the query know that the detailed information resides on the RIPE server.Apart from the RIRs mentioned above, there is also a commercial global service: Routing Assets Database used by some large networks (eg. large internet providers that acquired other ISPs in several RIR areas).

The process of registration was established in RFC 920. WHOIS was standardized in the early 1980s to look-up domains, people and other resources related to domain and number registrations. Because all registration was done by one organization in that time, one centralized server was used for WHOIS queries. This made looking-up such information very easy.

You could do a WHOIS lookup on a person's last name and get all the individual people who had that name. Someone could do a query on a keyword and see all registered domains containing that keyword. Someone could even query a given administrative contact and see all domains they were associated with. Due to the advent of the commercialized Internet, multiple registrars and unethical spammers, such permissive searching is no longer available.

At the time, these popular TLDs were switched to a thin WHOIS model. Existing WHOIS clients stopped working at that time. A month later, it had self-detecting CGI support so that the same program could operate a web-based WHOIS lookup, and an external TLD table to support multiple WHOIS servers based on the TLD of the request. This eventually became the model of the modern WHOIS client.

There are also many more country-code top-level domains. This has led to a complex network of domain name registrars and registrar associations, especially as the management of Internet infrastructure which has become more internationalized. As such, performing a WHOIS query on a domain requires knowing the correct, authoritative WHOIS server to use. Tools to do WHOIS proxy searches have become common. Also, there is a command-line whois client called jwhois which uses a configuration file to map domain names and network blocks to their appropriate registrars.

In most cases this was on a Unix or Unix-like platform. The WHOIS client software was (and still is) distributed as open source. Various commercial Unix implementations may use their own implementations (for example, Sun Solaris 7 has a WHOIS client authored by Sun).

There is not much interaction to do with a WHOIS server. In this context, the term "graphical client" is taken to mean a WHOIS client that runs as an application on a GUI OS and uses the OS's standard GUI for user interaction.

These support most of main TLD and remains free. But most of web-based whois sites are incomplete and do not support all TLD nor IP search.

Source: Wikipedia > Whois