whois and basic DNS

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:34 PM +0000 7/2/01, Sam Adams wrote:

>  this must be some advanced whois client. neither the Solaris 2.6
>  /bin/whois nor GNU OSF's jwhois understands an address with an "@",
>  like, foo.com at whois.networksolutions.com.

	In those circumstances, most whois clients also understand the 
"-h" option, which you can use like so:

		% whois -h whois.networksolutions.com example.com

>>  Your ISP can set up a zone for foo.com in their DNS servers, just like
>>  they today have a zone like ntl.com, rr.com, mediaone.net, etc.

	They can, but if they are rr.com or mediaone.net, my guess is 
that they won't.  These kinds of companies typically cater to the 
lowest-common-denominator residential customer, and aren't interested 
or able to provide more advanced services, such as maintaining a 
domain on your behalf.

	Indeed, allowing them to maintain the domain for you may cause 
problems in the future (what if you want to change ISPs, or they get 
bought, or they go bankrupt?), and if they are unresponsive, then 
you're just plain screwed.

>  I've 3rd edition of this book. Mostly I am just curious on how
>  this thing we use on a daily (or hourly for some) basis works.

	At that level, 3rd edition may be just fine.  However, you may 
want to at least take a look at 4th edition in a technical bookstore 
somewhere, just to see if there's anything new that you find 
interesting.

	Good luck!

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,$_)}'