Behind this rather barbaric name hides a very valuable tool for any user who wants to surf “smart”. Whois (contraction of “who is?”, Literally “that is?”) Is a service for consulting the databases “registries” (in French records) to obtain information about a domain name or an IP address.

Origins

Behind this rather barbaric name hides a very valuable tool for any user who wants to surf “smart”.

Whois (contraction of “who is?”, Literally “that is?”) Is a service for consulting the databases “registries” (in French records) to obtain information about a domain name or an IP address. This tool makes it possible to obtain information about the owner of a domain name, address, e-mail and even phone number. Very useful when it comes to check the seriousness of a particular website.

For the record, was a Whois – originally – a Unix utility that allowed to question a system linked to network to see if a user was hosted by this system. But today, when we talk about whois tool, it refers mainly to databases that identify the top-level domain names (top level domain or TLD) generic (gTLD), geographical (ccTLD country code TLD) or sponsored (sTLD for sponsored TLD).

The bases of registers (registries)

It is often best – and sometimes necessary – to go directly to the registry’s website, in charge of the TLD, to obtain information on a given domain name. Specify a register is a body authorized by ICANN to manage over the domain name. So there is a registry for .com domain names, one for domain names in .com, etc.

Thus, to perform a search on a gTLD .com, we can connect to the website of NSI www.netsol.com (now Verisign) which is in charge of the register .com. However, if you want to know more about the applicant of a ccTLD, it will instead turn to the whois database of the various national registers. For a .com, it will connect to the AFNIC website (http://www.nic.fr or http://www.afnic.fr). But for a domain name with extension .es (Spain), it will be more advisable to connect to the site ESNIC (https://www.nic.es/).

A complete list of registries (with direct access to the Whois database) is available at the following address:
http://www.norid.no/domenenavnbaser/domreg.html

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