On 5/14/07, Steven Heath <sheath@foxbane.co.nz> wrote:
> I've been doing whois lookups against whois.srs.net.nz for a few domains we
> host at work, mainly to look at the billed until date. However, small
> problem.. query 10 domains and suddenly they block you.
>
> Has anyone else come across this? if so who do you talk to to get the limit
> increased?

I asked the DNC office about this a month ago and told the limit was
decreased to due to 'undesirable activities' occurring. It has a time
vs query number aspect that you can soon work out.

I am not sure they will grant any expections to this rate limit.

Well, during my time as a registrar, they were certainly quite happy to remove the limit, providing no abuse was occuring.

IIRC the reason it was instated in the first place is because some overseas [spam/hack]ers were doing massive numbers of DNS queries using ISP's 'Check a domain here and register now!' forms on their websites causing the whois server to get a little overloaded.
If you'll notice there was actually a jump in the number who suddenly implemented one of those captcha verification codes on their sites a while ago - this is why.

IIRC they were just running through the exact same text list of domains via quite a few web forms.

I don't see any reason why NZRS couldn't add your IP address to the whitelist, provided you've got a good reason and no abuse is occuring, but I guess they might be reluctant to do this in case every man and his dog suddenly wanted to be whitelisted.

Cheers,
Blair