whois-Service

The DENIC whois Server

Some domain data must be accessible to the public. This includes, for example, the technical administrator of it. DENIC publishes this information in accordance with German data protection regulations. You find more detailed background information in a separate section of this webpage. The name that has established for this service for querying this public data is "whois". DENIC makes available two versions of this information service: a web-whois and a command-line-based whois. Data about the domain holder (Holder) and the administrative contact (Admin-C) will be output exclusively by the web-whois. In order to avoid automated queries, the user must decipher a Captcha before the information is output.

To be able to use the latter whois version you need a client that will query the domain data from the DENIC whois server. RIPE offers a whois client for downloading that supports all the parameters DENIC has implemented. Besides its IDN-based whois server (whois.denic.de) for .de domains DENIC offers a separate whois server (whois.enum.denic.de) for querying ENUM domains under .9.4.e164.arpa.

The examples following below also include data that will only be published in responses to whois queries if the domain holder has explicitly requested that data to be disclosed. The corresponding provisions are laid down in § 8 sentence 2 of the DENIC Domain Terms and Conditions and/or in § 8 sentence 2 of the DENIC ENUM Domain Terms and Conditions.

Some details about the current version:

• Response to query of a domain gives only domain status (connect, failed, free, invalid)
• Domain data can only be queried via the flag "-T dn (domain)" or "-T ace,dn (domain)".
• Standard data output in UTF-8. Other character sets can be specified via the flag "-C (Charset)".
• Queries can be made either for the IDN domain (e.g.: đäňîċ-ţåŝŧďómãĵņ.de / denic.de) or, using an additional flag, for the ACE form (e.g.: xn--dnic-loa.de / denic.de). (only in case of .de domain queries)
• For non-ASCII domains, the output always includes the IDN domain ("Domain:") as well as the ACE form ("Domain-ace:"). (only in case of .de domain queries)
• The date of the last update of the queried data set ("Changed:") is output in ISO-8601 format:
  
  yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss+(time zone) (for example: 2005-11-18T07:53:29+01:00)
• To query a phone number you must use the flag "-T dn:no (telephone number)" or "-T st:no (telephone number)" (only applicable for ENUM domain queries)

Description of potential flags: 

Flag	Description
-C (Charset)	The declaration of the In-/Output character set. Default: UTF-8. Possible values are: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, UTF-16. The declaration of the character set is case sensitive. It must be transmitted to the server in upper-case letters.
-T st|status domain	Default; Specific query of domain status
-T st:no|status:number telephone number	Default; Specified query of phone number according to domain status.
-T st,ace domain	Specific query of ACE-string and domain status.
-T dn|domain domain	Specific query of a domain data set.
-T ace,dn	ACE form of domain. Specific query of ACE string and domain data set.
-T dn:no telephone number	Specific query of the phone number of a domain data set.
-r domain	Turn off recursive lookups.

 

On the following pages you find some examples of .de domain and ENUM domain queries.

The HELP Function

The help function of the whois server can be invoked via the "HELP" button (case sensitive).

whois -h whois.denic.de HELP

% SYNTAX: whois [-rk] [-T types] [-C charset] key
%
% where our server understands the following options:
%
% -r turn off recursive lookups (default: on)
% -k establish persistent connection (default: off)
% -T new normalized output for domain description (default: off)
% -T ace ACE input for domain lookup
% -T domain (dn) only look for objects of type domain
% -T status (st) only look for domain status
% -C charset specify character set for the input/output
%
% Available charsets: US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, UTF-16 (default: UTF-8)
%
% NOTE: Read the detailed documentation for valid argument combinations. There are two special queries
%
% [?, HELP]
% displays this text
% alive[at]whois
% returns 'alive' if whois server runs properly
%

Notes on the Syntax of the Various whois Clients

There are different whois clients that do not all support the flags used by our whois server. Try two additional dashes before the actual flag or put the flag in quotation marks or use a combination of both. Below you find some examples:

whois -h whois.denic.de -- -T dn domain

whois -h whois.denic.de "-T dn domain"

whois -h whois.denic.de -- "-T dn domain"

Error Messages of the DENIC whois Servers

55000000002 Connection refused; access control limit reached

To avoid bulk queries to our whois servers and to ensure that the service is available to all users at any time, the number of queries within a defined time interval is limited. If this limit is exceeded, all further queries will be answered with the message "Connection refused; access control limit reached".