a lookup mystery. Very strange. yes/no? Does the domain exist or not?

[GeekGrrl]

http://bw.org/whois

A neat little perl script to simplify whois lookups in today's complicated
mess of registrars. Check it out.

On Fri, 7 Jul 2000, Jim Reid wrote:

> >>>>> "Robert" == Robert Chalmers <robert at chalmers.com.au> writes:
> 
>     Robert> I am coming across something I can't explain.  If I lookup
>     Robert> a domain with whois, it can say "No match"....
> 
>     Robert> Yes, nslookup returns a match, and a ping finds it.  Even
>     Robert> if I try other whois servers, it still wont match, yet
>     Robert> nslookup can find it. How is this so?
> 
> The information in some whois server's database isn't necessarily in
> the DNS. And vice versa. The situation with zones like .com is even
> more complicated because there are multiple registrars. If you ask
> whois.networksolutions.com, it will only return info about zones that
> were registered with them. For names registered with other .com
> registrars, it'll refer you to that registrar's whois server.
> 
> 
>