whois and basic DNS

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:21 PM +0000 7/2/01, Sam Adams wrote:

>  It appears if a whois search at http://domains.yahoo.com
>  shows that a given domain name is available, then it is
>  *available*.

	This may or may not be true.  That's why there are a lot of 
companies in this business, some of which sell their services for a 
fee.  You'll have to decide if they really can deliver a superior 
product that is worth paying for.

>                There're many more web sites like domains.yahoo.com
>  that perform the whois search and return the availability info
>  of a given domain. Why would anyone pay for just checking
>  availability of a desired domain name?

	See above.  The freely available services may or may not be doing 
everything you think.  Even if they currently appear to be doing 
everything you need, you could use them for an extended period of 
time, only to have a very rude surprise in the future.  If/when that 
happens, you'd have to find another solution anyway.

	The key question is, are you willing to pay someone for that kind 
of service, so that if/when they fail to be able to deliver, you now 
have someone on the hook that you can go back to for satisfaction?

>  I came across this FAQ at http://thenic.com/faq/faq4.asp
>  that basically reads:
>    Q: How has the WHOIS system changed with registrar
>       competition under .com, .net, and .org?
>    A: When one company ran the system there was one set of records.
>       Under the new system a WHOIS lookup takes two steps.
>       First obtain the registry records for a domain and then
>       go to the correct registrar to the ownership
>       information.

	I am aware of how whois works.  Indeed, your server may well just 
be doing the first part.  However, it is also entirely possible that 
Network Solutions may have a private database that they make 
available *only* to their internal clients, such as their internal 
whois server.  This private database could well have access to 
information that simply is not available in any other place, not even 
the Network Solutions public database.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

/*        efdtt.c  Author:  Charles M. Hannum <root at ihack.net>          */
/*       Represented as 1045 digit prime number by Phil Carmody         */
/*     Prime as DNS cname chain by Roy Arends and Walter Belgers        */
/*                                                                      */
/*     Usage is:  cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob        */
/*   where title-key = "153 2 8 105 225" or other similar 5-byte key    */

dig decss.friet.org|perl -ne'if(/^x/){s/[x.]//g;print pack(H124,$_)}'