It’s getting on to Friday, and I thought I would post another Cool Tool for your enjoyment.  For anyone who dabbles in domain names, or does much with networking, you have undoubtedly used the Whois command.  Whois is a tool for querying domain name information, like who is the owner of it, the DNS servers, and more.  It’s very handy when you want to see if that domain name you always wanted is taken or not.  Why not just type it into the browser and see if it comes up, you ask?  Well, just because a domain doesn’t show up in your favorite browser, doesn’t mean it is not registered.  Sometimes the domain owner hasn’t done anything with it yet, or they might use it for email but not a website, or it could simply be that a domain squatter has it, and therefore only owns it to resell it.

Aside from that, I have been in troubleshooting situations where I needed to find out some info on a particular domain name, like mentioned above, the DNS servers for example.  Or one time, I was getting spammed to death from one domain, and we determined it was a virus with a little research, so we looked up the domain owner and were able to tell him that his server had been infected.  He didn’t even know!

Regardless of what your needs are, if you need a good, fast, and free Whois client, check out win32whois from gena01.com.  It’s a kicking little program, that I have made sure to add to my trick bag.  It appears to be very well written, fast, and best of all it’s free.   Check it out and happy Whois-ing!