SmartWhois

SmartWhois

 

SmartWhois is a useful network information utility that allows you to look up all the available information about an IP address, hostname or domain, including country, state or province, city, name of the network provider, administrator and technical support contact information. It helps you find answers to these important questions:

• Who is the owner of the domain?
• When was the domain registered and what is the owner's contact information?
• Who is the owner of the IP address block?

 

With SmartWhois you can focus on your work; the program will unmistakably choose the right database from over 100 Whois databases all over the world and fetch the most complete results within a few seconds. SmartWhois supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), so you can query domain names that use non-English characters, like German umlauts, French accent grave, or fully consist of the letters from Chinese, Hebrew, Russian, and other alphabets. It also fully supports IPv6 addresses.

 

Screen Shots

 

 

Features

• Smart operation: The program always looks up Whois data in the right database; you don't have to waste your time trying them all.
• Integration with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook. Look up domain owners and IP addresses in e-mail headers instantly!
• Saving results into an archive: you can build your own database that can be viewed offline.
• Batch processing of IP addresses or domain lists.
• Caching of obtained results.
• Hostname resolution and DNS caching.

• Integration with CommView Network Monitor: Can be accessed from CommView for quick, easy lookup.
• Calling SmartWhois directly from your application.
• Wildcard queries.
• Whois console for custom queries.
• Country code reference.
• Customizable interface.
• SOCKS5 firewall support.

And much more!

 

Who needs SmartWhois

• Everyone who uses standard Whois utilities: SmartWhois saves a lot of time and does things standard Whois utilities can't do.
• People who hate spam or want to identify the origin of suspicious e-mail messages: check the message header and locate the real sender! You can also send e-mail to the network administrator with a mouse click.
• Webmasters who want to study the logs more carefully and are unable to identify many IP addresses.
• Online vendors who want to learn exactly where an order comes from.
• People who want to identify the origin of suspicious e-mail messages by studying the headers.

 

System Requirements

 

SmartWhois runs on Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 / 10 or Windows Server 2008 / 2012. Both 32- and 64-bit versions are supported. 

 

SmartWhois FAQ

 

Q. Can I use SmartWhois if I'm behind a firewall or a proxy server?

A. Yes, SmartWhois supports SOCKS firewalls and HTTP/HTTPS proxy servers (they must support the CONNECT method). If your firewall is not SOCKS-compliant, you'll have to configure it to allow network traffic on TCP ports 43 and 80. Please refer to your proxy server's documentation or contact your network administrator for information on configuring (mapping) proxy ports.

 

Q. I made a query using wildcard, but the program's status bar displays "Connection timed out" before I get any results. How can I make it work?

A. Using wildcard queries usually takes longer to retrieve data than using normal queries. To handle this problem, you should set a longer timeout period (Settings => Options => Queries). For example, you can change the timeout period from 45 seconds to 100 seconds.

 

Q. Why do I get the "Connection timed out" or "Connection failed" errors?

A. There are several possible reasons:

	Your connection to the Internet is too slow or "fuzzy," which usually happens when you have a low quality telephone line. Try to reconnect to your ISP.
	The Whois server the program is connecting to is down. SmartWhois obtains information from official Whois databases, and these databases are not in our control. So you'll have to wait until the server is up and running again, which normally doesn't take long.

 

	If you enabled IP address/hostname caching in the Options, the program might fail to connect to a Whois server if its IP address has recently changed. Click Clear Cache in Settings => Options => Cache => DNS.
	Your network environment does not permit outbound TCP connections on ports 43 and 80. This is often the case when you don't have direct Internet access, e.g. you are behind a corporate firewall, or if you installed a personal firewall with incorrectly configured packet-blocking rules.

 

Q. When running a batch query, I only get certain percentage of the domains / IP addresses processed. Why some of the records are unavailable?

A. Many Whois databases temporarily or permanently ban an IP address after receiving a certain number of queries over a fixed period of time. To avoid being banned, we suggest that you use a great number of proxy servers for connecting to Whois severs. SmartWhois is capable of selecting a random server from the proxy list every time the application connects to a Whois server. This may help you avoid being banned.

 

Q. Can I call SmartWhois directly from my application?

A. Yes. You can use the command-line interface to send an IP address or domain to SmartWhois and run the query.

 

Q. My firewall software warns me that SmartWhois is "attempting to access the Internet." I am aware that some sites are able to track users by collecting the information sent by their programs via Internet. Why does SmartWhois "attempt to access the Internet"?

A. What alerts your firewall are the attempts to connect to Whois databases to fetch the requested records, and the attempts to connect to DNS serves to resolve IP addresses to hostnames. The primary function of the program is to obtain the most current records available from Whois databases; therefore SmartWhois makes outbound connections on TCP ports 43 and 80 and UDP port 53. There are no other hidden activities. We don't sell spyware.

 

Q. When I click on the SmartWhois icon in the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox toolbar, the program box flashes up briefly and then vanishes. Why this feature isn't working?

A. The SmartWhois plug-in window is displayed only when it is active, and it is automatically closed when the focus is moved to another window. Most likely you have a software running that is changing the focus and activates other windows, or always moves its window on top. We would suggest to close all other running applications one by one to see which one is affecting SmartWhois. Another reason for this behavior could be the mouse cursor settings on your computer. Certain mouse driver utilities allow you to configure the cursor to activate the window under the cursor, or even bring it to the foreground. When these features are enabled, they will prevent SmartWhois window from staying open.

 

Q. I can't see the owner information when querying Chinese or Japanese domains; I see gibberish instead of characters.

A. To see text in East Asian languages, you should install East Asian fonts in Windows. Open Control Panel => Regional and Language Options, select the "Languages" tab, and check the "Install files for East Asian languages" box.

 

Q. What are LOC records and are they supported by SmartWhois?

A. A LOC record stands for geographic location information: some domains and IP addresses may have a special DNS record that stores the object location coordinates (Latitude, Longitude, etc.). SmartWhois can query this information and generate a Google Map link to view the location of an object on the map.

 

Q. What are internationalized domain names and are they supported in SmartWhois?

A. An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or Hindi. And, yes, SmartWhois supports IDN queries.

 

Q. IPv6 queries don't work for me. Is there anything I can do about it?

A. To successfully make IPv6 queries you need to have Windows XP or later operating system installed. If you're running Windows XP, the IPv6 support should be installed. To install it, open a Command Prompt window and execute the following command:

 

netsh interface ipv6 install

 

Note: IPv6 is not supported on Windows 2000 or earlier operating systems.