In message <007701c795ac$c9249580$966e000a(a)craigcdaacab45>, "Craig Spiers" write s:

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.

There is an automatic blacklist which is triggered by a rate of recent requests from the same IP address (and/or netblock). Querying, eg, 10 domains a day isn't a problem (I regularly do this by hand in the course of my work), but querying 10 domains one after another, with no delay, from a script is likely to trigger the blacklist. After a quiet period (some hours?) the IP will fall back out of the automatic blacklist. (I believe there's also a manual blacklist for particularly troublesome offenders.) If your queries are not time critical (and it sounds like from later posts to NZNOG they're not), I'd suggest slowing your queries down so that you're only doing, eg a dozen queries an hour. (I'm assuming given the choice of forum that you have a legitimate reason for doing this. Illegitimate purposes are likely to get you permanently blacklisted anyway.) It may also be helpful to know that at least some registrars provide a customer-usable interface to the whois XML interface bulk query for the domains belonging to you that are registered through them. Which may be an easier way to get the information that you want. Ewen