On Mon, 5 Nov 2001, domreg wrote: > Is it possible to access the Opensrs whois server web interface from > our own scripts ? Basically we have a customer level database that > knows the domain names, but we were using a URL like this: > http://www.opensrs.org/cgi-bin/whois.cgi?action=lookup&domain=on-the-net.com > > It gets "access denied" now, I assume, since it is not coming from the > opensrs form page. > > Is there a replacement way to do this ? If so, how ?
I've been running a script against the whois server to keep an eye on domain changes. It's been a very frustrating process for a couple of reasons. 1) "Record last updated" gets touched every time there's a whois query. This makes diffing harder than it needs to be. 2) The whois server seems to be pretty unreliable. There were problems a year or so ago with doing queries from the command line whois client in RH62. Now that I've got a script connecting I'm seeing about 1 in 25 queries respond with "unable to retrieve". These whois server reliability problems affect my day to day workflow of trying to get things done, but they also are an embarassment because my highly technical clientelle have run into it too and inquired about it. I've grown to have a pretty poor impression of the OpenSRS whois server through all of this. My inquiries regarding #1 have gotten a response along the lines "it'll be fixed someday". I haven't tried to push issue #2 since they seemed to get the RH62 issues fixed, but the response I got back then was that it wasn't very important. The whois server doesn't seem to be a priority to OpenSRS. It's a bag on the side to them and sadly it shows. My script keeps all the responses in a SQL database so I've got a bit of history of the unreliability. I haven't had a chance to thoroughly analyze the results to the point of being able to send in a bug report. If someone at OpenSRS is interested in fixing this I'd be happy to share my data and script. -- </chris> Neither sweat, nor blood, nor frustration, or lousy manuals nor missing parts, or wrong parts shall keep me from my task.
