In addition to the DNS protocol, there is a little-used protocol which is immensely useful: the WHOIS protocol to look up just who registered what name. It is not a very good protocol, but it works. It is a useful way to lookup the owners of domains and find out just who is out at a particular network address.

You can do WHOIS queries from a telnet session, if you really want. telnet port 43 of one of the WHOIS servers (like whois.godaddy.com) and fish around for the server which contains the information you are looking for. But that is a hassle and you have to keep looking for the right server if you get the wrong one. Work fit for a computer.

So a few years ago, I wrote a Windows XP client for the WHOIS protocol. It is not very deluxe. It takes a single input and gives you a notepad-like dump of the output of the various whois servers which it knows about. It does not even allow you to copy or save the entry which you find. But it worked.

About a year ago, one of the WHOIS servers changed the output and the program got into an infinite loop at END-OF-FILE of the WHOIS output. I finally fixed that problem. So if you have the old version, you will want to upgrade.

The way the program works is this: you run the program (if you want a shortcut, its up to you), type in the name-of-the-site.com, push the OK button, and a few seconds later, you get a window with the listing of the WHOIS information. Just as a reminder: just the name of the domain is required. Leave off http:, www, or any other adornments.

I have put a copy of the WHOIS.EXE program out on my server, here. Its linux md5 checksum is: c33c0022af0062ccadc649674681d7f5 whois.exe

This program is free software, provided AS-IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY. If you find a bug and want to fix it, the source is here. Its linux md5 checksum is:eb0f5362a95b6bdbc4c331447b77b2b2 whois.zip