Browser Based WHOIS Lookup

WHOIS webservice available?

[redherring917]

What I'd REALLY love is a browser based IP WHOIS lookup function that could be accessed perhaps via a Web Service... inputting an IP and receiving as output the related WHOIS information.

Although this would seem to be a very reasonable requirement, large amounts of time spent looking have so far yielded nothing appropriate.

Does anyone out there know of such a solution? I'd be more than happy to pay for the service.

Thanks!

[wheel]

Google 'reverse IP lookup'. There's about a bajillion services doing this for free :).

[rocknbil]

As wheel suggested, whois webservices abound so I'm guessing you must mean your OWN whois, is this correct?

If you're on Linux this is very nearly a one-liner in perl or PHP:

$ip = $qs{'ip'}; ## Where input vars are stored in %qs
$ip =~ s/[^0-9\.]//; ## numbers and dots only
$who = `whois $ip`;
$output = qq¦<p>Whois for ip address $ip:</p> <pre> $who </pre>¦;

print "content-type: text/html\n\n";
print $output;

Word of warning, if you make this public it's likely to get hammered by requests, and not all of them will be legitimate, a lot more should be added for security.

[creeking]

the search box on firefox needs a whois lookup option (IP and regular whois)

[redherring917]

Thanks everyone.

Yea, I've found lots of places on the Web that will do it via their interface, but I want access to a web service or an API so that we could do it "ourselves"... programmatically providing an IP and getting back the associated WHOIS info (in XML if possible).

I'm perhaps naively a bit surprised not to find such a web service widely available... if it's truly out there I've missed it and would love to be pointed in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

[redherring917]

Like this is an example of something that would seem to work, maybe...

[phpwhois.org...]

Although I'd like to find more of an actual "web service" whose output we could get in XML and play with a bit as desired.

Thanks.

[draggar]

the search box on firefox needs a whois lookup option (IP and regular whois)

There is a plugin that will do that, kinda. It will give you the WhoIs information of the page you're currently on.

I think it is the Project WhoIs plugin or SEO-Quake?

[rocknbil]

Although I'd like to find more of an actual "web service" whose output we could get in XML and play with a bit as desired.

I'm going to take a wild guess as to the "why." You can see by my previous post, doing something yourself, on your own website, is really a trivial task. So primarily, anyone can do this.

I hinted that if you make it public, it is likely to get hammered. By this I mean, automated bots or scrapers will use this area of your site, and ONLY this area of your site, not visiting other areas which provide you revenue, and place a load on your bandwidth without return.

So it stands to reason - why would I want to make an XML whois feed that will tax my bandwidth for very little or no return, especially since anyone can do it on their own server?

That would be my guess <shrug>.