whois : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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whois

A Unix utility to find out who owns a given domain name or IP.

Whois

There are five common questions about domain names and IPs you may have:

Who owns this IP?
I know the domain name. What IP does it map so I can put an entry in my hosts. file.
Who owns this domain name?
Where on the planet is this IP broadcasting from?
What is my face IP?

1. Who Owns This IP?

For the first question, who owns or is currently using this IP, see IP lookup services

GeekTools: find owner of a given IP.
arin.net
whois.sc
CyberAbuse.org: find owner given IP or DNS name.

2. Finding the IP From a Domain Name

For the second question, finding the IP given the domain name, you need an DNS lookup service:

www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois for .com, .net and .org
www.cira.ca for .ca
whoisreport.com for .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us. This search is more flexible letting you find usaweatherreport.??? by typing just weather. The best way to figure out what all the option check boxes are for is just to tick them one at a time and see what the effect is.
Whois Source: various TLDs, also allows lookup by IP.
You can use TweakDUN to look up DNS names and add their ips to your host file. You can also use it to lookup up DNS names with the DNS abilities of your computer and its gateway.

3. Finding out who owns a Domain

For the third question (who owns this domain) use one of these whois services:

Checkdomain.com. Does not make you take a typing test to use the service as many others do.
101Domain.com. Does not make you take a typing test to use the service as many others do.
www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois for .com, .net and .org
www.cira.ca for .ca
whoisreport.com for .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz and .us. This search is more flexible letting you find usaweatherreport.??? by typing just weather. The best way to figure out what all the option check boxes are for is just to tick them one at a time and see what the effect is.
Whois Source: various TLDs, also allows lookup by IP.

You might think it sufficient for to check if a domain name is taken to simply point your browser to www.xxxxx.com and see if you get a 404 not found error. However, the name may be taken, with no webserver set up, so the name would appear to be free when it was actually taken.

4. Finding out Where a Domain/IP is Located

For third question (where is the domain located) use one of these Ip locator services:

location.com.my: a commercial service.
Discussion of kludges to get an approximate answer.
IP Locator
ShowMyIP.com: just tell your face IP, and where you are. Hopefully you already know.
netgeo.
Google geographical location ip address
MaxMind sells code to obtain the country, region, city, latitude, and longitude of any IP address. This would often be an ISP rather than the actual company responsible for content.

5. Finding our Your Face IP

For the fifth question you need a face IP or face identifier:

Your face IP:[38.103.63.18] is displayed at the bottom of every page of this website. I do this with Novell SSI.
IPchicken.com: tells your face ip, and which ports you have open. They also tell you your face name, e.g. your URL on the web, possibly temporarily assigned for your connection. It might look something like this S010609991195576dda.gv.shawcable.net. That is not my real one. I don’t want to encourage hackers.
http://checkip.dyndns.org:8245/
http://www.whatismyipaddress.com has many annoying ads you must close to discover the answer.

The face ip is different from the IP of your computer on the LAN. An IP of a computer on a LAN is typically something like 192.168.2.7. The router has two ips, one it talks to the computers on the lan often 192.168.2.1 and one it uses to talk to the outside world, dynamically assigned by the ISP using DHCP.

domain names
face IP
IP
NetGeo
Soap WhoIs Service

	Please email your feedback for publication, errors, omissions, broken/redirected link reports and suggestions to improve this page to Roedy Green :
	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43]
	Your face IP:[38.103.63.18]	The information on this page is for non-military use only.
	You are visitor number 16,165.	Military use includes use by defence contractors.
	You can get a fresh copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/Mindprod website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/jgloss/whois.html	J:\mindprod\jgloss\whois.html