Thu, 2007 Sep 20

Whois Resources

Posted in Computing at 00:58 by jmorgan

Yay for whois! Isn’t it cool. No. Wouldn’t it be nice if whois queries returned YAML results? Yes. Actually, maybe I’ll do that… Anyway, that’s not the point.

I’m looking into writing a Ruby library for whois lookups. Yup, there’s two out there, neither of which really fit my “needs”. So, as is my want, I’m using a blog entry as a place to store some resources information, both for my future use and also in hopes that it may prove useful to someone else.

First, the two existing Ruby libraries:

1. Michael Neumann’s whois module: This is what I’m currently using. It’s quite simple (in a good way), but currently only checks nine TLDs (most importantly to me, not including several I use, such as .us). That being said, I think adding others would be trivial, i.e. just defining the server to check. The bigger downside, to me, is that it doesn’t give “easy-to-use” methods. It returns more or less raw data in an array. What I’m considering is a more “abstracted” approach. That being said, if you’re looking for a Whois library in Ruby, this is an excellent start.
2. Whois Ruby: This library looks promising, but, as far as I can tell, only gets whois information on IP addresses. Since I just want domain name whois details, this does not seem to be what I’m looking for. If you are looking for IP information, though, this is worth a look.

If I do work on this library, these will both be useful. My other question (beyond what currently exists) is where to find the whois servers for various TLDs, and (probably through trying them), how are the information and formats compare?

• Wikipedia has what will probably be a useful list of TLDs
• The IANA has a less-pretty list of the same. Valuably, after selecting a list, and then a TLD, you arrive at a page with details. At the bottom of that page is the whois server. Yay! So that will be a main resource.
• The IANA’s IP Address Services page would probably be a good place to start looking for whois servers on IP address, or the aforementioned Whois Ruby library.