[HN Gopher] Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete ___________________________________________________________________ Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete Author : ementally Score : 83 points Date : 2022-09-24 15:14 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.netmeister.org) (TXT) w3m dump (www.netmeister.org) | LinuxBender wrote: | Does anyone here run their own whois for their own domains using | srv records? If so, how many hits per day do you get? I'm curious | because I have never seen anyone request _srv _nicname_.tcp._ | from my nameservers. | duskwuff wrote: | > Does anyone here run their own whois for their own domains | using srv records? | | I don't think that's possible. WHOIS, by design, is controlled | by the domain registry, which may delegate it to registrars -- | the owner of the domain may have some limited control over the | contents (like the registrant information), but they don't get | to control it fully, and I've certainly never seen a registrar | delegate WHOIS to the domain owner. | LinuxBender wrote: | Makes sense. I've only ever seen it delegated when I would | swip out a cidr block to a b2b customer and even then the | people I interacted with never asked to run their own whois, | only custom PTR delegation. | | I can not find any whois clients that support this expired | ietf draft [1] so I assume it was abandoned. | | [1] - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sanz-whois- | srv-0... | [deleted] | cdubzzz wrote: | Here's a random thing I made for RDAP a long long time ago. It | has lots of bugs but has come in handy from time to time: | https://rdap-explorer.chris-wells.net/ | indigodaddy wrote: | Interesting, was not aware of RDAP, thank you. | sedatk wrote: | This IP address breaks the service: https://rdap- | explorer.chris-wells.net/144.122.199.20/results... | cdubzzz wrote: | Lots of IPs break it haha. Maybe now I'll take some time to | look in to that... | zanethomas wrote: | once upon a time i wrote a whois server | Fileformat wrote: | I ran into the same issue but worked around it slightly | differently: have my code use RDAP, and then have an RDAP->WHOIS | proxy [1]. There are usually rate-limits on WHOIS, so public | instances won't survive long, but it works for me and you can run | locally. | | I also hunted (s/whois/rdap/g) around for undocumented RDAP | servers and found a few. There are still a lot of TLDs without | RDAP though [2]. | | [1] https://rdap.redirect2.me/ (source at | https://github.com/redirect2me/rdap-proxy) | | [2] https://resolve.rs/domains/rdap-missing.html | superkuh wrote: | Whois was killed off by the European Union passing the GDPR. It | really changed how I use the internet for the worse. In the old | days I could always at least send an email to a domain hosting a | service. Now there's no default contact information and | everything is behind walled gardens. | | Email was the great communicator. Removing it from WHOIS made the | web more fragile and broken. But whois doesn't have to be that | way and the problems are not intrinsic to whois. They are | stemming from political interference done with good intentions | but bad outcomes. | dredmorbius wrote: | Mentioned in TFA FWIW: | | _the ICANN [contact disclosure] requirement now does indeed | conflict with modern privacy laws, such as the EU 's GDPR, | meaning all domains registered by European registries are in | violation of either GDPR or ICANN's requirement._ | dvh wrote: | In a similar way ftp clients are guessing what is filename when | they parse the output of "dir" command. | teddyh wrote: | FTP solved this in 2007 with RFC 3659, which includes the MLST | command. | tptacek wrote: | One of many reasons FTP is moribund. | alexott wrote: | Yes, 100%. I'm trying to use registration information for | cybersecurity stuff, and it's a mess. Some TLDs just doesn't | provide that information or provide it only to registered | accounts or only inside their country. Parsing is a mess. Many | have rate limits, like .au has 20 requests/day, .cz - 100 day, | but with delay of 3 minutes between requests, ... | gayn1gga wrote: | cloudyporpoise wrote: | It's sad we can't improve and build modern APIs that can support | load and querying and exactly why companies exist whose main | business function is scraping services like WhoIs, Social Media, | or Sites behind cloudflare. | tptacek wrote: | As the article observes, we can and are doing that: that's what | RDAP is. | brightball wrote: | A few years back I tried building my own Whois parser and you're | right, it's a mess. Before you even factor in all the fun rate | limiting. | illuminerdy wrote: | I can't get the page to load for some reason, but I don't think | whois is obsolete. I used it via command line to search for | available domains when I was creating my blog. It was simple and | effective for that purpose. | billpg wrote: | Why do domains have WHOIS records anyway? I get why IP blocks | have it because machines actually _do_ things from behind IP | addresses, but the only thing I 'm _doing_ from a domain name is | stopping other people from using it. | | Someone is hosting copyrighted content? Look up that machine's | IP-WHOIS. | | Someone is trying to DDOS me? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. | | Someone is holding a domain I want? If their answer is going to | be anything other than a straight "no", they'll happily provide a | way to be contacted. | | Please tell me how I'm wrong. | tooltower wrote: | It probably made more sense in the pre-web Internet, when not | all domains were necessarily serving web traffic. Or had any | obvious or standardized way of serving a "contact us" page. | akira2501 wrote: | The DNS SOA record has an RNAME field that is available to | convey this information. | teddyh wrote: | See also the RP (Responsible Person) record; RFC 1183: | https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1183.html | layer8 wrote: | A single IP can host many domains, each of which may have | separate technical and administrative contacts. Conversely, | different subdomains (and MX for email) can live on different | IPs. If I use dyndns, there isn't any fixed relation between IP | and domain at all. I happen to own several domains, but I don't | own the IPs where they are hosted. | openasocket wrote: | Once worked on a whois scraping project and ran into a bunch of | issues. | | One particularly fun story is how we might have broken a whois | server. It was the country TLD server for some West African | nation, I think Senegal but I'm not sure. We hit their server | with like a hundred queries in rapid succession (to test what | rate limiting approach they used) and requests started hanging. | We switched IP addresses ... and still requests were hanging. We | tried multiple IP addresses in totally different networks, all of | them hung or timed out, even for a single request. A day later we | retried and all of a sudden it started working again! From that | point on we made sure to never do more than a couple requests a | second to that particular domain. | | Also, any queries to one cc TLD (either Egypt or Ukraine, can't | remember which) just returned "we don't provide information in | whois requests" or something to that effect. | | GoDaddy didn't do traditional rate limiting. If you exceeded | whatever their limit was they didn't just return an error | message, they would blacklist your IP and for any query say | "visit our website for information", and their website gated | things behind a captcha. | indigodaddy wrote: | Speaking of fragile perhaps.. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-24 23:00 UTC)