Zone File Interpreting Questions

[x11joex11]

I just got access to the com.zone.gz file, I was able to unzip it and inspect it but I'm not sure what to make of it.

Does anyone have experience with navigating these and could tell me what it means?

It seems fairly obvious when you look at it in the start of the file, but half way down the file and at the end the order in which the words are arranged appears to reverse and worse, some areas seem to look like they are encrypted, I'm not sure.

Any advice or input is appreciated, I'm using this to improve my domain name finding tool. Thanks guys!

 

[Kate]

Perhaps you could post a sample.

The domains are the lines with NS entries, most domains have two name servers so you have the same domain twice in the file (one line per name server) but there can be more. A few domains have no name servers, so they are inactive and they do not show up in the zone file either.
But it's a small number.

The top of the file contains comment lines (with a leading and there are records that you probably don't need if you just want to build the list of active domains.

Again, if anything is unclear paste the text here.

 

[x11joex11]

So this means it will not be 100% accurate if I use this for finding available domain names correct? It makes me wonder how other sites are able to accurately determine available domain names without turning to massive use of the who-is servers? (which as I'm finding is not working). My server gets killed from the requests and stops working .

I suppose if the domain does not appear in the zone file I'll just have to assume it's available and make a 'double check' option in my program.

 

[Kate]

The registrars have dedicated access to the registry, they don't need to perform a whois query. They just ask the registry if the name is available or not, and they return the result to you. They don't need the whois details.

If you want to check domain availability in bulk you could use a registrar API. The .com zone file contains all the 'active' domains, that is those that have at least one name server declared. It's 99.5%+ of all .com domains I guess. So if a domain name is missing from the zone file it's very likely that it's actually available. It's not a bad idea to first check against the zone files to build your list of available domains, then double check the list with a live check at a reliable registrar.

What are you trying to achieve exactly ?

 

[x11joex11]

I'm trying to make a program that will find only available domain names out of a pattern.

My tool for example would take a list of keywords you give it, like, "red","blue","green", and another set of keywords, "software,biz,website" and give you all the possible combinations of those words together and return the available names. I'm trying to keep all the data in the database so that way I don't have to perform whois queries on each of the results.

This would make my tool extremely useful for finding only available domain names for complex patterns.

---------- Post added at 06:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:42 PM ----------

If you know of any paid services that have lists of registered domain names for the different TLD's, I would be interested in monthly payments to these services. The only one I know is premiumdrops, but they use the zone files so it would have the same issue.

 

[Kate]

Sounds like you are on the right track. You need a script to parse the zone file and extract the registered (and active) domains. Then you insert the list of domains into a database with indexes for fast lookups.

For other gTLDs you can apply with the respective registries for zone file access.