Become a Domain Spy - Investigate Yourself

WHOIS – Be a Domain Spy!!

You may come across an irresistible offer to buy a domain name on a forum like Digital Point or on ebay and you just want to go ahead and buy it, however before you buy, you wish to confirm the credentials of seller, details of domain and location of web servers. Or, you really like things about a website such as speed, performance and other things, and intend to host your site at the same place. Another scenario could be that you would like to contact domain admin for some reason but the site doesn’t provide you the link to contact. How would you find out all this information from the net? The answer is rather simple — just do a WHOIS and you would get a whole lot of information, that is otherwise not available to you.

What is WHOIS
WHOIS (pronounced “who is”) is a TCP-based query/response protocol which is used for querying an official database in order to determine the owner of a domain name, an IP address, or an autonomous system number on the Internet.

There are command line utilities to do whois, along with modern net based tools that give you information about a domain name and web site. These tools and utilities query WHOIS servers and provide standard information. Web-based WHOIS clients rely on the WHOIS protocol to connect to a WHOIS server and do lookups, and command-line WHOIS clients, where ever available are used by system administrators.

The WHOIS system originated as a method that system administrators could use to look up information to contact other IP address or domain name administrators.

How To WHOIS
As mentioned above, there are command line utilities mostly available on *nix platform in as open source software. One can create there own WHOIS clients using Java, C or other languages to run on their specific platforms. Web based WHOIS is most popular where you just have to feed domain name and you are presented the information, mostly text on your web browser almost instantly.

Where To WHOIS
Comman Line utilities: You may download a number of utilities available on the web as free ware or paid software for Windows. One utility I have tried and tested is available here. Unix has inbuilt commandline utility. If you would like to compile your own Java Client, a sample code is available here.

Web Based:
Pubdomains.com WHOIS
Pubdomains.in Whois

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Key Information Extracted from WHOIS
Most of WHOIS servers provide following information :

• Domain Name – This is the domain you wish to investigate.
• Registrar – The company the domain is registered with – like http://www.pubdomains.com
• Creation Date – Tells you the date the domain name was created on.
• Expiration Date – This is when the domain name expires.
• Updated Date - Tells you when information on the whois record was updated. This could pertain to addresses, nameservers, or simply if the domain was renewed for another year.
• Registrant Contact – This is who owns the domain.
• Administrative Contact – This is who is in charge of the domain.
• Technical Contact – This is who you contact if there’s a problem.
• Billing Contact – This is who pays for the domain.
• Whois Server – The whois database this information came from.
• Referral URL – This is who you talk to if you want to make changes to the domain name.
• Nameserver – First nameserver (also called the primary nameserver)
• Nameserver – Second nameserver. (also called the secondary nameserver)
• Nameserver - This domain has a third nameserver as well: you can have as many as needed, although the norm is two. Depending on which whois service you use, you may also see the IP addresses associated with the nameservers.
• The nameservers generally will tell you where a domain is hosted. You can do a whois search on the nameservers to get more info on the host itself.
  

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As an example if we wish to find out more about a domain registered on pubdomains.com, we feed domain name vu2.in in the web based interface and get following information

Registered through: Pubdomains – (Public Domains Registrars http://www.pubdomains.com)
Domain Name: VU2.IN
Created on: 11-Oct-08
Expires on: 11-Oct-09
Last Updated on: 20-Dec-08

Administrative Contact:
Name, Address
Delhi, 110035
India

Technical Contact:
Name, Address
Delhi, 110035
India

Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.PUBDOMAINS.IN
NS2.PUBDOMAINS.IN
Registry Status: ok

Note: If the registrant has privacy against whois, you wouldn’t be able to check the credentials of the site.

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