Documentation
ON HOLD DOMAIN SCANNER


System Requirements

  • Perl 5
  • Modern whois (superwhois works) - must work with new internic
  • Telnet
  • A gigantic list of domain names (you can build or purchase)

Preliminaries

  • Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.
  • Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM
  • After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

whois.cgi

Upload and chmod to 755.  Edit the 3 paths below to their obvious values.

  • $domaindatabase = "/full/path/to/domains.txt";
  • $onholdfile = "/full/path/to/onhold.txt";
  • $domainbase="/full/path/to/whois.dat";

Set $threshold to some value that's sane.  I would suggest 30 days.  If someone lets a domain get down to the last month without renewing there is a fair chance they are not planning to renew it.

Upload Your Files

  • Upload all files into cgi-bin somewhere.   Chmod whois.cgi to 755.  Everything else chmod to 666 or 777
  • Obviously you will need to fill domains.txt with actual domain names.  You can either purchase domain name lists or do extractions with superspider

Let the good times roll...

  • Ok its ready to rock... to execute type
  • perl whois.cgi
  • The expired domain names will be stored inside of the file called onhold.txt