Is there a way to create a local version of whois.sc?

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,135
11,997
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www.anyf.ca
I want to be able to type an IP or domain and know the information such as owner. I imagine this would be a HUGE database, but is there a way to do this?

Whois.sc which is what I always use has this annoying captcha now. it's not enough that you have to click on the squares, you have to wait till they SLOWLY fade so that there is new ones. I spent about 10 minutes screwing around with that just so I can know who owns a certain IP address.

When checking firewall I like to know who owns IPs, so I know what purpose I may be getting traffic to/from it.

So is there a way to download that whole database locally? I imagine there must be some central repository somewhere? I'm interested in IP addresses more than domains, as I imagine there are way more domains than there are IP addresses so that would be an insane download.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
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Or just use a different site? Centralops.net gives anonymous users 50 look ups per day. No captcha's or anything.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,135
11,997
126
www.anyf.ca
I don't want to be limited in any way, I just want to be able to do as many lookups as I want. Those sites must be getting the info from somewhere. Or does it cost a lot of money to get access to that?
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,135
11,997
126
www.anyf.ca
Hmmm sounds like it's an actual issue then where there is sorta a monopoly. Guess I'll just have to find another service that does not have the captcha. I always liked whois.sc since you can literally type the IP or domain in the URL. like whois.sc/123.123.123.123 will give you the info for that IP. The captcha seems to be really hit and miss though, like sometimes there's none.
 

XavierMace

Diamond Member
Apr 20, 2013
4,307
450
126
I don't want to be limited in any way, I just want to be able to do as many lookups as I want. Those sites must be getting the info from somewhere. Or does it cost a lot of money to get access to that?

I have to ask... Why? What are you doing that you need more than 50 lookups per day.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,135
11,997
126
www.anyf.ca
I have to ask... Why? What are you doing that you need more than 50 lookups per day.

I manage various servers such as local and online ones, so when I see traffic in logs that are potentially suspicious I like to look them up. That helps me get an idea of the traffic. Like the other day I saw a whole bunch of traffic going to a certain IP, so I looked it up, and then based on the owner I knew it was legit traffic. My end goal was to have a local system so I don't need to rely on a 3rd party but guess since the info is not really made available in raw form that might not be possible.
 

mxnerd

Diamond Member
Jul 6, 2007
6,799
1,100
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Use Microsoft's Whois tools and output it to a text file like whois.txt

Assume that the whois.exe utility is in folder C:\whois

then under C:\whois folder, you execute a command like "whois ipchicken.com >> whois.txt" and you get whois info about ipchicken.com in whois.txt file, then you use any scripting language like PowerShell or VBScript to parse the file and get the info you want.

===

If no info found, it will say

"The requested name is valid, but no data of the requested type was found."
 
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Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
67,135
11,997
126
www.anyf.ca
I'm not on Windows, but I'm kinda curious how those tools work, do they just lookup through Microsoft's own service, or do they get the raw data from somewhere?

But I guess worse case scenario I'll just switch to another service that does not have the captcha. Will just need to break the habit of typing it directly in the url like I do with whois.sc. though some of the other ones may possibly have that option too, need to look into it further.