Yes, but this is only usable by registrar's :) of which we are not :) Thanks anyway though! -----Original Message----- From: Jasper Bryant-Greene [mailto:j(a)digiweb.net.nz] Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 10:28 AM To: Sam Sargeant Cc: nznog Subject: Re: [nznog] Whois Server On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 10:26 +1200, Sam Sargeant wrote:

On 5/14/07, Craig Spiers 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.

If you're a registrar it's recommended you use the XML api to the SRS for queries like this. The folks at NZRS (www.nzrs.net.nz) might be able to tweak their whois blacklisting if that's not an option for you.

The XML API has a limit of 10 queries per second anyway, as of earlier this year. Jasper _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

On 5/14/07, Steven Heath wrote:

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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