Weblog Entry
whois
January 08, 2004Well call me just plain out of it. Or blame it on my complete lack of Unix chops. Either may be accurate.
Until now I’ve been bouncing off of NetSol and putting up with the ridiculous (and highly inaccessible) image-based security widget every time I’ve run a whois search on an existing domain.
Google just launched a whois search, which is cool in and of itself (although the prospect of more spam doesn’t thrill me). What caught my attention though, was an off-the-cuff remark by Joi Ito:
I guess this is useful for people who won’t touch a command line, but I don’t think I’d ever use it. I will continue to open a terminal window and type “whois google.com”.
Well now, OS X’s terminal does whois. Nice!
Let us imagine, and take ourselves back, way back, lo, even five years ago. Tell someone that in the future you will recommend a Mac over Windows because of the command-line tools.
We’ll leave the question of whether that is progress as an exercise for the reader.
Its been on windows for years too via http://www.cygwin.com/
Yep, Mac OS X comes with all the command line tools most UNIXes tend to have. Very handy!
As far as the SmartyPants stuff, I’ve noticed things like this in several sites that use it. It doesn’t seem to do anything on comment previews.
“As far as the SmartyPants stuff, I’ve noticed things like this in several sites that use it. It doesn’t seem to do anything on comment previews.”
That depends *entirely* on whether you have encorporated it into your comment-preview template. It doesn’t do anything in templates that have not been modified to use it: <MTSomeTemplateTag smarty_pants=”2”>.
Using one set of template options to *preview* comments and another set of options to finally *display* them on your blog is what produces the little circus act above.
And you can even type whois followed by an IP address to find out where that nasty spammer comes from ;-).
“That depends *entirely* on whether you have encorporated it into your comment-preview template. It doesn’t do anything in templates that have not been modified to use it: .”
Ahh… See, I’m not a MovableType user (let alone a SmartyPants user), so I didn’t know that. Thanks for clarifying.
My favorite site for whois and other info is DNS Stuff.
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
Being under certain circumstances keeping me on Windows I too was fed up with web-based whois, but discovered Cygwin a few months ago.
My personal army of command-line tools, which presumably will be on OSX, is:
nslookup
dig
host
mx
whois
ping
traceroute
And there you were, thinking of going back to windows. ;)
The commandline ‘whois’ command is less than convenient to use nowadays. Fortunately, being on OSX, you can define your own, more convenient to use ‘front-end’ to whois. Here’s mine, a shellscript called ‘mywhois’:
[script removed. SmartyPants mangled the quotes.]
Oh %#$@!
Please remove all the “"s from the above. I put them in because you appear to use SmartPants in your comment listing template, but not (it seemed) in your Comment preview template.
The “"s were there to make sure we got straight quotes, rather than SmartyPants’s curly quotes. (Since you don’t allow HTML in you comments, I couldn’t very well just wrap the *code* in some <code> tags, which would have had the desired effect.
I *hate* having to second-guess the comment system …
http://www.samspade.org
This site offers a plethera of network related tools.
Whois, IP Whois, Traceroute, etc. I discovered it while thumbing through an issue of hacker’s quarterly at the bookstore one day.
Check it out if you don’t know how or have no desire to touch the command line.
Jacques, my unfriendly MT commenting setup is a secret ploy to reduce comment volume to levels where I can actually read them again…
Er, but, sorry about that. Looks like it actually worked out in the end, minus the odd smart quote which I’ve fixed. My preview templates are both still ugly stepchildren at the moment.
Not much of an improvement, Dave. Backward single quotes (the outermost quotes on line 3 of the script are backquotes) became forward single quotes.
Don’t try this script at home, folks!
try finding an applicationon your computer name Network Utilities (located in the ‘Utilities’ folder within the ‘Applications’ folder). it’s a gui for whois and more
I highly encourage Windows users (bleh) to take a look at Sam Spade (http://www.samspade.org/ssw/) for their network querying needs.
Am I the only person who remembers http://www.internic.org/whois.html ? In fact, my Linux machines don’t have the “whois” command–I think “dig” might be able to do whois queries though.
The best thing ever is http://whois.sc.
Just get a free account, set it to login for life, and then enjoy typing this and getting a feature-rich response page every time:
http://www.whois.sc/domainame.com
whois.sc is written in assembley language which denies any XML namespacing hosts from querry. I would suggest using a script line editor such as cobol to cache zone file requests…
Take a look at http://www.srscheck.com. It finds the registrar who registered the domain, then goes to that particular registrar to get info on the domain.