Domain Availability Service (aka whois without limits)

[elhoim]

I discovered that service while looking in the eurid (.eu registry) docs.
[registrar.eurid.eu...]
It says that you can check availability of domains by doing requests to das.eu, and there is no limits on the number of requests or the speed at which you can do it.

The only thing is that unlike whois, you don't get the other informations (technical contacts, etc...).

The only seemingly relevant page that i found, is :
[dns.be...]

Does anybody knows if other registries than the ones for .be/.eu are doing this? Because it would be really useful for a script that i am writing to search for domain domains on various TLDs.

[jmccormac]

I don't think that too many registries are using DAS at the moment. Also the number of queries and the speed at which they can be sent are limited. The query speed, from memory, is one per second. Many of the ccTLD registries have a whois query limit per IP. Some have a daily limit of 100 lookups per IP and others restrict it to 100 per hour.

There is a strong connection between EURid and dns.be - the management seem to be mainly ex dns.be people. Much of the EURid paperwork is copied from DNS.be contracts and agreements.

The DAS is very useful for .eu because it is such a completely banjaxed extension. Tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of .eu domains are hidden from the net by speculators and cyberwarehousing operations by not having active nameservers. Therefore they do not appear in the .eu zone. Using a DAS or WHOIS lookup is the only way of verifying that these domains exist.

Regards...jmcc

[elhoim]

Quoting from the eurid page that i pointed:
<<The service is called DAS (Domain Availability Service) and does not have limitations as to how many queries can be done in a given time.>>

I think you were more thinking of traditional whois.

[jmccormac]

It is based on experience. :) Also I think the Belgian document mentions a time penalty that is applied if two queries arrive within a 1 second window. DAS is fine for simple sporadic lookups like the ones you describe but bulk lookups are trickier.

Regards...jmcc