RE: [PHP] whois

> There's a very cool service out there, you can go to for instance > ba.whois-servers.net to find server for .ba. > > So you can basically go to ${TLD}.whois-servers.net to find server for > $TLD. The trouble is that it's not really current. [jason@phpdev jason]$ nslookup es.whois-servers.net Name: whois.ripe.net Address: 193.0.0.129 Aliases: es.whois-servers.net ... no, thats not the right server. Some ccTLD's just don't *have* public whois servers. (ES is one of them, I contacted them and asked for their whois server address and they said to use their web interface, since giving me the IP would constitute a security risk(!)) Remember a good chunk of ccTLD registries are still being run from a single machine tucked under a desk in an office somewhere, too. A few months ago I spent a few days tracking down whois web interfaces and servers, and made the information into a nice little MySQL database, along with some PHP3 scripts that'll query it using either the server (if found) or pointing people to the web interfaces with the appropriate variables filled in to their form submission. You can see it running on www.inww.es in the WhoIs and the Availability Check areas (try doing an nslookup of that at es.whois-servers.net :)). Anyone interested in the data structure and underlying scripts, let me know and I'll see what I can do about packaging it up. Jason -- Jason Murray jasonm@melbourneit.com.au Web Design Team, Melbourne IT Fetch the comfy chair!