Dutch domain names that are about to expire, are not announced in public.
I am interested in finding out if there are techniques to somehow regularly scan .nl domains and see if they still are registered?
One theoretical way would perhaps be to scan DNS servers for all registered .nl sites and check the entries for all these sites on a regular basis.
Practically this might be a little overkill as there are now more than 2.6 mil .NL domains registered. But I don't really know how registration exactly works, so there might be some other more practical methods?
Anybody any thoughts one this?
Cheers,
Tim
One theoretical way would perhaps be to scan DNS servers for all registered .nl sites and check the entries for all these sites on a regular basis.
Nope.
You give a DNS server a name. It gives you an IP address.
You'd have to try every possible combination of letters.
A DNS server will not yield a list of names that it has on file, unless it is mis-configured. While DNS servers have the capability to provide a "zone file" download, they are normally configured to do so only with authentication (e.g. a password) as a security measure.
Example: let's say I have example.com, and have set-up hosts and subdomains named www, mail, office, home, and megalith. Can somebody go to the DNS server for example.com and get that list of hosts, without knowing the host names in advance? Not if it's properly-configured.
Now, to learn the names of all of the subdomains in .nl, you'd have to go to the .nl DNS server. Now, do you think that server is so mis-configured? Not on your life.
The ability to download a zone file is required in DNS in order to transfer data from a master server to duplicates. Many, many, many years ago one could do that without authentication, because nobody had yet thought that this was a security problem. Today it's rare to be able to do it without authentication, and if you can it's considered a serious security flaw.
I am interested in finding out if there are techniques to somehow regularly scan .nl domains and see if they still are registered?This depends on the deletion cycle.
One theoretical way would perhaps be to scan DNS servers for all registered .nl sites and check the entries for all these sites on a regular basis.First of all, you would require a list of all registered .nl domains. That's the hard part. Also the Dutch language means that the .nl ccTLD will have more unique domain names than other TLDs such as .info or .biz. The country code domains tend to be like that.
Practically this might be a little overkill as there are now more than 2.6 mil .NL domains registered. But I don't really know how registration exactly works, so there might be some other more practical methods?The simple way is to track the domains that you are interested in and check the whois on that domain periodically. Checking the whois on 2.6M domains is a sure way to get banned by the registry.
Regards...jmcc
I'm not sure of their source, but at least in one of the commercial domain name softwares (paid version) the .nl zone file is available for download. It's supposed to contain every .nl domain.I think I know this software. From what I remember, it is working from the last known good copies of various zones. At the moment, like many other European ccTLD registries, the Dutch .nl registry does not permit access to its zonefile (I think).
Regards...jmcc
Any other interesting views on this?
Thanks,
Tim
