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Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
I wrote to Ben, early Monday:
> OK, I've finished testing all 270 TLDs.
271. As an extreme oddity, it turns out that .arpa is both a valid TLD and serves up meaningful port-43 WHOIS data. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.arpa (DNS admins know .arpa from their reverse-DNS zonefiles, but there are other portions of the namespace.)
However, .arpa's WHOIS data lacks expiration dates, FWIW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Generic_top-level_domains points out a variety of other wacky valid TLDs and proposed TLDs, but none other than .arpa is both valid and serves WHOIS data.
My favourite of the wacky TLDs is .root, described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrsn-end-of-zone-marker-dummy-record.root
> As noted, .my, .tk, and .tw aren't yet handled, but can be.
Ben, no hurry, but any time you can tweak the regexes for those three final additions, it would be good.
Other readers: http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/network/domain-check-testdata has notes, and the latest release of domain-check is in that directory.
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxmafia.com]
On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 02:55:33PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> I wrote to Ben, early Monday: > > > OK, I've finished testing all 270 TLDs. > > 271. As an extreme oddity, it turns out that .arpa is both a valid TLD > and serves up meaningful port-43 WHOIS data. See: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.arpa (DNS admins know .arpa from their > reverse-DNS zonefiles, but there are other portions of the namespace.) > > However, .arpa's WHOIS data lacks expiration dates, FWIW.
Heh. I don't think we have to worry about them expiring without noticing; that would be like a gasoline truck running out of fuel.
> > As noted, .my, .tk, and .tw aren't yet handled, but can be.
And now have been. I've done the test with both 'whois' and 'jwhois', and it seems that the output in both cases, for all the domains on your list, is now parseable with my regexes. Well, except for "ficora.fi" which seems to be down today ('connection refused', quoth the Raven; in fact, all of .fi seems to be "whois"less for the moment) - but I suspect that it'll work just fine when it comes back up.
The only remaining question in my mind is "do we know for sure that 'domain-check' is actually parsing the right dates in all cases?" I've done an actual comparison against 20 or so domains; however, I don't have the time or the patience to run it against all 271 of them. Hopefully, if someone ever runs into a problem, they'll contact me.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben@linuxmafia.com):
> The only remaining question in my mind is "do we know for sure that > 'domain-check' is actually parsing the right dates in all cases?" I've > done an actual comparison against 20 or so domains; however, I don't > have the time or the patience to run it against all 271 of them. > Hopefully, if someone ever runs into a problem, they'll contact me.
There actually are "only" 48 ccTLDs + 14 gTLDs = 62 total that would need checking. Those are the ones with asterisks next to them, in my domain-check-testdata file: those are the ones empirically verified to serve up meaningful data including expiration dates from their respective port-43 WHOIS servers.
That 271 figure is the total number of valid, consensus-DNS TLDs, period, regardless of whether they serve WHOIS data in any form. However, even that total includes six ccTLDs that aren't in use, plus one that's effectively offline for lack of a working DNS zonefile.
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
On Wed, Aug 15, 2007 at 11:07:16AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben@linuxmafia.com): > > > The only remaining question in my mind is "do we know for sure that > > 'domain-check' is actually parsing the right dates in all cases?" I've > > done an actual comparison against 20 or so domains; however, I don't > > have the time or the patience to run it against all 271 of them. > > Hopefully, if someone ever runs into a problem, they'll contact me. > > There actually are "only" 48 ccTLDs + 14 gTLDs = 62 total that would > need checking. Those are the ones with asterisks next to them, in my > domain-check-testdata file: those are the ones empirically verified to > serve up meaningful data including expiration dates from their > respective port-43 WHOIS servers.
Darn it, I appear to have mislaid that file. I've checked all the emails I got from you during this project, and I think I may have lost that one - if you send me that list, I'll give it a shot.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *
Rick Moen [rick at linuxmafia.com]
Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben@linuxgazette.net):
> Darn it, I appear to have mislaid that file. I've checked all the emails > I got from you during this project, and I think I may have lost that > one - if you send me that list, I'll give it a shot.
It was /usr/local/share/domains-test, which essentally what you get from this algorithm:
Start with http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/network/domain-check-testdata . Grab the second and third columns (whois server and test case) of all lines below the header lines, that have an asterisk in column one. Invert their order. Save. Use with domain-check's -F option.
I've saved /usr/local/share/domains-test as http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/network/domains-test, and will maintain it there.
(I hope domain-check's -F-switch parsing ignores comment lines.)
Ben Okopnik [ben at linuxgazette.net]
On Thu, Aug 16, 2007 at 02:11:24PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Ben Okopnik (ben@linuxgazette.net): > > > Darn it, I appear to have mislaid that file. I've checked all the emails > > I got from you during this project, and I think I may have lost that > > one - if you send me that list, I'll give it a shot. > > It was /usr/local/share/domains-test, which essentally what you get from > this algorithm: > > Start with http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/network/domain-check-testdata . > Grab the second and third columns (whois server and test case) of all > lines below the header lines, that have an asterisk in column one. > Invert their order. Save. Use with domain-check's -F option.
Ah - perfect. Thanks!
> I've saved /usr/local/share/domains-test as > http://linuxmafia.com/pub/linux/network/domains-test, and will maintain > it there. > > (I hope domain-check's -F-switch parsing ignores comment lines.)
Yep. And blank lines as well.
-- * Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://LinuxGazette.NET *