Richard

Is it technically possible for the registrar details in whois (for a .com domain) be out of date, or is the whois the canonical source of the info? If it is possible, how would I go about finding out who's really in control? Does a registrar have an interface for that?

.com is a thin registry, which means that registrars hold the registrant data and publish the WHOIS, not the registry. There have been problems with many registrars over the years not publishing correct data or publishing data for domains that they are no longer the registrar for but ICANN has put a lot of effort into compliance and that is getting much better. The WHOIS protocol does normally return whatever is the canonical data stored by the actual registrar and so if that’s not telling you what you want then you won’t get any better information from the registrar. When you conduct a WHOIS for a .com it will include a block like this at the top: Domain Name: <something>.COM Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 146 Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com which tells you the registrar’s WHOIS. You can query that directly with: whois -h <whois server> <domain name> but it’s unlikely to tell you anything different. Send me the domain off-list and I might be able to help. Jay

Unfortunately I'm not sure how reliable my client's own records are on this ...

Cheers, Richard _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

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