Whois Proxy

I recently had the opportunity to try out Whois Proxy, a Perl whois tool that offers an intuitive experience for looking up domain information. The tool is available as either a CGI or command line program, and it provides comprehensive information on domain ownership, technical contacts, abuse desks, IP addresses, NIC handles and ASN of any domain on the internet.

In my opinion, Whois Proxy is a complete rewrite of the GeekTools whois proxy, and it has more features, including the option to run it as a web application. Another great thing about the Web interface is that it is validated strict XHTML and CSS2.

Before using this tool, you should ensure that you have the required Perl libs, which include Net::DNS, Posix, and CGI. Additionally, there are some optional Perl libs, such as HTML::Parser and Cache::FileCache, which you can choose to install.

When I used the tool, I noticed that the latest version has been updated to generate only HTML 4.01. The developer had previously tried to use pure XHTML 1.1, but due to unpredictable output from whois servers, they had to switch to HTML format. Alan also tweaked the mailto: link generation and made updates to ZapTrash.cgi and whoislist, among other minor tweaks.

All in all, I found Whois Proxy to be a reliable and useful tool for getting domain information. I'm excited about the new package the developer is working on, which will likely improve the tool even more.