WHOIS Server

[Yann Berthier]

On Wed, 07 Apr 2004, Tim Wilde wrote:

> 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.

   And if that fails, you can try to query the completewhois.com whois
   server, it does quite a good job

      - yann