[Leica] [OT] WHOIS

["Michael E. Bérubé" <MEB@goodphotos.com>]

At 01:48 PM 4/19/01 -0500, Bill Satterfield wrote:
>Tell me about WHOIS please.


There are several places that you can do a WHOIS lookup on the net. One of 
my favourites from a browser is:

http://www.opensrs.org/whois/index.shtml

With the new shared registration system model, the nature of the WHOIS 
server has changed.

The Old Way:A single query returned full whois data.
Traditionally, the InterNIC maintained the WHOIS server for .com, .net and 
.org domain names, and a single query returned full whois data including, 
registrant, administrative contact, billing contact, technical contact, and 
nameserver information.

The New Way:
In the multi-registrar model, each registrar maintains a WHOIS server 
containing contact and nameserver information for domains registered with 
them. The InterNIC maintains a central, registry WHOIS server, which simply 
contains nameserver and registrar information for all .com, .net and .org 
domains.

To find out the registrar of record for a domain, consult the registry 
WHOIS server, at:
http://rs.internic.net/whois.html
The output from the registry WHOIS query will indicate the website address 
and WHOIS server address for domain's registrar of record, where full 
contact information can be found.


Happy hunting.
Michael