WhoIs Analyzer Pro: Review and Giveaway
Have you ever come up with a great domain name, and wanted to know if it’s already taken? Ever wondered who owns Internet.com? Have you tried to figure out whom to contact about the spam you keep receiving? WhoIs Analyzer Pro improves on its command-line cousin, making domain lookups easy, fast, and more useful than before.
The WhoIs protocol provides a connection to databases with information on the owner of a domain name (yahoo.com), an IP address (66.94.234.13), or an autonomous system number, or ASN (26101). Back when computer networks were new and obscure, systems administrators used WhoIs as a way to look up and contact other sysadmins. But now that there are numerous registrars, all with their own databases of domains they’ve registered for clients, using only one WhoIs database may return no information at all, or not enough information to be of any use.
Enter WhoIs Analyzer Pro, from VOSTROM. With it, you can type in a domain name, an email address, an ASN, or an IP address, and the application will automatically locate the best database and return any information it finds. This feature, known as Smart/Automatic server selection, takes care of locating the best WhoIs server for you, and is one of the most unique features of this app. You can also pick a specific WhoIs server instead, if you want to view the information one registrar has compared to another.
The main application window is clean and straightforward: Type in the domain you’re looking for (1), and select a WhoIs server if you want (2), or just let WhoIs Analyzer Pro select the best server for you. When you start the search, you get basic info on the domain (3), then more in-depth info if it’s available (4). At the bottom of the screen, you can view a log of what WhoIs Analyzer Pro is doing (5).
In addition to the Smart server feature, you can also open multiple windows and submit multiple queries simultaneously. You can search for an email address, an ASN, or a URL in addition to the more common domain name/IP address search. Once you have found the results of your queries, you can print, email a pdf, or save the results in HTML format, all from within the application. And if that isn’t reason enough to try the software, the company behind WhoIs Analyzer Pro, VOSTROM, develops solutions specifically to address network reliability and security issues. These guys know what they’re doing!
I only found two minor cosmetic issues with the application, both of which should be fixed by the next release. First, right-clicking on the toolbar brought up a blank box in the middle of the screen, for some reason; left-clicking made it disappear (1). Second, the HTML file generated from Save Result contains some non-ASCII characters, which are easily removed with BBEdit (2)–and this does not happen when printing, emailing, or saving as a PDF, only when saving and viewing the HTML. Again, both of these minor appearance issues will be fixed by the next release, according to VOSTROM.
WhoIs Analyzer Pro can be downloaded from VOSTROM’s WhoIs Analyzer website, and costs $24.95 (or if you act fast, you can still buy it from MacUpdate’s past promo link with a 20% discount). However, the generous folks at VOSTROM have offered TWO FREE LICENSES of WhoIs Analyzer Pro. Simply post a comment below with a URL, email address, IP address, or ASN that you looked up, and how the experience was for you — especially if you found out something surprising or unusual in the WhoIs information. Post between now and midnight on Tuesday, April 22nd for a chance to win!
Looked up google.com just for the sake of it…came up with this:
GOOGLE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
GOOGLE.COM.ZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM
GOOGLE.COM.YAHOO.COM.MYSPACE.COM.YOUTUBE.COM.FACEBOOK.COM.THEYSUCK.DNSABOUT.COM
GOOGLE.COM.WORDT.DOOR.VEEL.WHTERS.GEBRUIKT.SERVERTJE.NET
GOOGLE.COM.VN
GOOGLE.COM.UA
GOOGLE.COM.TW
GOOGLE.COM.TR
GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
GOOGLE.COM.SPROSIUYANDEKSA.RU
GOOGLE.COM.SERVES.PR0N.FOR.ALLIYAH.NET
GOOGLE.COM.SA
GOOGLE.COM.PLZ.GIVE.A.PR8.TO.AUDIOTRACKER.NET
GOOGLE.COM.MX
GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET
GOOGLE.COM.IS.HOSTED.ON.PROFITHOSTING.NET
GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM
GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM
GOOGLE.COM.DO
GOOGLE.COM.CO
GOOGLE.COM.BR
GOOGLE.COM.BEYONDWHOIS.COM
GOOGLE.COM.AU
GOOGLE.COM.ACQUIRED.BY.CALITEC.NET
GOOGLE.COM
Jason
I think this is great, I’ve been looking for a mac app for whois, and this seems to do the trick very nicely. I looked up the school web address (uoguelph.ca) with and it displays all the information I need. It’s perfect.
I looked up my domain which is a country specific domain and it did retrieved the whois record, in other softwares i had to add the whois server manually.
domain: shamlan.com.sa
organization: Shamlan Inc.
address: P.O.Box 13231
address: 31493 Dammam
address: Saudi Arabia
admin-c: AS228-SA
tech-c: AS228-SA
reg-c: AS228-SA
nserver: ns1.dreamhost.com
nserver: ns2.dreamhost.com
nserver: ns3.dreamhost.com
req-date: 2005-09-03
reg-date: 2005-09-11
source: SaudiNIC
i dug up the old and funny “justfuckinggoogleit.com” and it turns out that the domain is set to expire in about 4 weeks!! if they don’t renew, i think macapper oughta grab it
this is an awesome tool - wish they’d marry it to some of the functions of domainer so that it could double as a domain owner management tool and incorporate all such features…
I just love these programs that are very simple wrappers for pre-existing tools or services that are free. So the developers whip this up and slap a $25 price tag on it.
You can look up domains easily here:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/
There are other batch WHOIS tools out there as well.
This is a great little app which would simplify tracking down people I hope to buy domains from. I looked up geni.us with it and the service was excellent.
I bought this last month, and although it can be done in terminal and on the web I prefer using this tool. Also, I can save to html if I want to etc, I think its worth the 24 bucks..
So I tried this out. Yes, as has been stated, you can do this on the web, terminal, whatever. I liked it. I did find the save as HTML to have the cosmetic issues described above. Glad to know it will be fixed. If I am lucky enough to win a license, I’d be quite happy. If not, I definitely will consider purchasing.
I looked up Apple.com. Here is my results from WhoIs. What surprised me was that the expiration date is less than a year off… perhaps I’ll put it on backorder
whois.verisign-grs.com
Domain Name: APPLE.COM
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com
Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com
Name Server: NSERVER.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER.ASIA.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER.EURO.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER2.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER3.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER4.APPLE.COM
Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Status: clientTransferProhibited
Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Updated Date: 16-jul-2007
Creation Date: 19-feb-1987
Expiration Date: 20-feb-2009
whois.markmonitor.com
Registrant:
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc.
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino CA 95014
US
eddingsk@apple.com +1.4089744286 Fax: +1.4089741560
Domain Name: apple.com
Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com
Administrative Contact:
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc.
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino CA 95014
US
eddingsk@apple.com +1.4089744286 Fax: +1.4089741560
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
NOC Apple (NA4189-ORG)
Apple Inc.
1 Infinite Loop M/S 60-DR
Cupertino CA 95014
US
Apple-NOC@APPLE.COM +1.4089961010 Fax: +1.4089741560
Created on…………..: 1987-02-19.
Expires on…………..: 2009-02-19.
Record last updated on..: 2008-03-30.
Domain servers in listed order:
nserver.euro.apple.com
nserver.apple.com
nserver4.apple.com
nserver3.apple.com
nserver2.apple.com
nserver.asia.apple.com
MarkMonitor.com - The Leader in Corporate Domain Management
————————————————–
For Global Domain Consolidation, Research & Intelligence,
and Enterprise DNS, go to: http://www.markmonitor.com
————————————————–
I also looked up the Apple.com website.
This app will be very useful for my computer networking course next year!
I looked up some other mac-related sites, mainly the now in hiatus deal sites, and found that they are indeed, for the most part, in ownership for many months to come.
Maybe something good will come of maccappaday.com?
@Cap: ordinarily I’d agree with you. But I know of this guy. IIRC he’s connected to the GeekTools people. His work on OS X is weird because he’s not using native tools but I don’t think this is a wrapper. Still I wouldn’t use it because 5.7 MB on the download is just hysterical and I can get what I want from Spike which is ‘native’ and does the ‘magic’ search by default for about 1/100th the disk footprint.
I’ve used it to look up my company’s domain name, and my family’s domain name, and the data’s very good. As others have said, yeah, you can do this manually if you have the time and know how to do it, but Whois Analyzer Pro sure makes it easier.
I’ve used it when servers on our sight have been under attack, and a quick analysis of the attack source is needed. I definitely recommend this tool.
[...] week I reviewed WhoIs Analyzer Pro, a fast, easy domain lookup application. The developers offered two licenses to [...]