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Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

netmeister.org

11–20 of 54 posts

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#11
post #9

Why do domains have WHOIS records anyway? I get why IP blocks have it because machines actually do things from behind IP addresses, but the only thing I'm doing from a domain name is stopping other people from using it. Someone is hosting copyrighted content? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is trying to DDOS me? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is holding a domain I want? If their answer is going to…

It probably made more sense in the pre-web Internet, when not all domains were necessarily serving web traffic. Or had any obvious or standardized way of serving a "contact us" page.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#12

Does anyone here run their own whois for their own domains using srv records? If so, how many hits per day do you get? I'm curious because I have never seen anyone request srv _nicname_.tcp. from my nameservers.

> Does anyone here run their own whois for their own domains using srv records?

I don't think that's possible. WHOIS, by design, is controlled by the domain registry, which may delegate it to registrars -- the owner of the domain may have some limited control over the contents (like the registrant information), but they don't get to control it fully, and I've certainly never seen a registrar delegate WHOIS to the domain owner.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#13
post #9

Why do domains have WHOIS records anyway? I get why IP blocks have it because machines actually do things from behind IP addresses, but the only thing I'm doing from a domain name is stopping other people from using it. Someone is hosting copyrighted content? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is trying to DDOS me? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is holding a domain I want? If their answer is going to…

A single IP can host many domains, each of which may have separate technical and administrative contacts. Conversely, different subdomains (and MX for email) can live on different IPs. If I use dyndns, there isn’t any fixed relation between IP and domain at all. I happen to own several domains, but I don’t own the IPs where they are hosted.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#15

Does anyone here run their own whois for their own domains using srv records? If so, how many hits per day do you get? I'm curious because I have never seen anyone request srv _nicname_.tcp. from my nameservers.

> Does anyone here run their own whois for their own domains using srv records? I don't think that's possible. WHOIS, by design, is controlled by the domain registry, which may delegate it to registrars -- the owner of the domain may have some limited control over the contents (like the registrant information), but they don't get to control it fully, and I've certainly never seen a registrar delegate WHOIS to the dom…

Makes sense. I've only ever seen it delegated when I would swip out a cidr block to a b2b customer and even then the people I interacted with never asked to run their own whois, only custom PTR delegation.

I can not find any whois clients that support this expired ietf draft [1] so I assume it was abandoned.

[1] - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sanz-whois-srv-0...

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#16
post #7

Here’s a random thing I made for RDAP a long long time ago. It has lots of bugs but has come in handy from time to time: https://rdap-explorer.chris-wells.net/

This IP address breaks the service: https://rdap-explorer.chris-wells.net/144.122.199.20/results...

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#17
Yes, 100%. I’m trying to use registration information for cybersecurity stuff, and it’s a mess. Some TLDs just doesn’t provide that information or provide it only to registered accounts or only inside their country. Parsing is a mess. Many have rate limits, like .au has 20 requests/day, .cz - 100 day, but with delay of 3 minutes between requests, …

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#18
post #16
post #7

Here’s a random thing I made for RDAP a long long time ago. It has lots of bugs but has come in handy from time to time: https://rdap-explorer.chris-wells.net/

This IP address breaks the service: https://rdap-explorer.chris-wells.net/144.122.199.20/results...

Lots of IPs break it haha. Maybe now I’ll take some time to look in to that…
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