WHOIS Server

[Tim Wilde]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004, Odhiambo Washington wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> I am lost as to where to do whois queries these days. It seems that
> every TLD extension has been assigned to some particular registrar (or
> what do I call it?)
> What is the sane way of doing whois for "any" domain extension
> (.com/.org/.biz, etc)?

FreeBSD's WHOIS does this for you automatically.  It works by using
whois-servers.net:

dig com.whois-servers.net. +short
whois.verisign-grs.com.
198.41.3.54

ANYTLD.whois-servers.net will CNAME to the appropriate WHOIS server for
that TLD.  FreeBSD's WHOIS (for quite a few versions now) will
automatically try to extract the TLD from your query and query the
appropriate server, as long as you don't explicitly tell it one to use.
It will also follow referrals, so WHOIS on a .com will get you the .com
registry response followed by the response from the actual registrar the
domain is with.

Tim Wilde

-- 
Tim Wilde
twilde at dyndns.org
Systems Administrator
Dynamic Network Services, Inc.
http://www.dyndns.org/