Posts Tagged ‘while’

How to run your Own / Personal Domain Web WHOIS service in a minute with SpeedyWHOIS

Thursday, April 5th, 2012

Running your own personal WHOIS service speedy whois in browser screenshot

I've been planning to run my own domain WHOIS service, for quite sime time and I always postpone or forgot to do it.
If you wonder, why would I need a (personal) web whois service, well it is way easier to use and remember for future use reference if you run it on your own URL, than wasting time in search for a whois service in google and then using some other's service to get just a simple DOMAIN WHOIS info.

So back to my post topic, I postpopned and postponed to run my own web whois, just until  yesterday, whether I have remembered about my idea to have my own whois up and running and proceeded wtih it.

To achieve my goal I checked if there is free software or (open source) software that easily does this.
I know I can write one for me from scratch, but since it would have cost me some at least a week of programming and testing and I didn't wanted to go this way.

To check if someone had already made an easy to install web whois service, I looked through in the "ultimate source for free software" sourceforge.net

Looking for the "whois web service" keywords, displayed few projects on top. But unfortunately many of the projects sources was not available anymore from http://sf.net and the project developers pages..
Thanksfully in a while, I found a project called SpeedyWhois, which PHP source was available for download.

With all prior said about project missing sources, Just in case if SpeedyWhois source  disappears in the future (like it probably) happened with, some of the other WHOIS web service projects, I've made SpeedyWhois  mirror for download here

 
Contrary to my idea that installing the web whois service might be a "pain in the ass", (like is the case  with so many free software php scripts and apps) – the installation went quite smoothly.
 
To install it I took the following 4 steps:
 
1. Download the source (zip archive) with wget 
 
# cd /var/www/whois-service;
/var/www/whois-service# wget -q https://www.pc-freak.net/files/speedywhois-0.1.4.zip
 
2. Unarchive it with unzip command 
 
 
/var/www/whois-service# unzip speedywhois-0.1.4.zip
…
3. Set the proper DNS records

My NS are using Godaddy, so I set my desired subdomain record from their domain name manager.
 

4. Edit Apache httpd.conf to create VirtualHost
 
This step is not mandatory, but I thought it is nice if I put the whois service under a subdomain, so add a VirtualHost to my httpd.conf
 
The Virtualhost Apache directives, I used are:
 
<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerAdmin hipo_aT_www.pc-freak.net
        DocumentRoot /var/www/whois-service
        ServerName whois.www.pc-freak.net
        &lt;Directory /var/www/whois-service
        AllowOverride All
        Order Allow,Deny
        Allow from All
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
 
Onwards to take effect of new Webserver configs, I did Apache restart
 
# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache2 restart
 
Further on You can test whois a domain using my new installed SpeedyWHOIS – Web WHOIS service  on http://whois.www.pc-freak.net
Whenever I have some free time, maybe I will work on the code, to try to add support for logging of previous whois requests and posting links pointing to the previous whois done via the web WHOIS service on the main whois page.
 
One thing that I disliked about how SpeedyWHOIS is written is, if there is no WHOIS information returned for a domain request (e.g.) a:
 
# whois domainname.com
 
returns an empty information, the script doesn't warn with a message there is no WHOIS data available for this domain or something.
 
 
This is not so important as this kind of behaviour of 'error' handling can easily be changed with minimum changes in the php code.
If you wonder, why do I need the web whois service, the answer is it is way easier to use.
I don't have more time to research a bit further on the alternative open source web whois services, so I would be glad to hear from anyone who tested other web whois service that is free comes under a FOSS license.
In the mean time, I'm sure people with a small internet websites like mine who are looking to run their OWN (personal) whois service SpeedyWHOIS does a great job.

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Posted in Everyday Life, System Administration, Web and CMS | 5 Comments »

General check-up

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Today I made my general medical check-up. Now I’m waiting for the results I hope they would be fine. But ofcourse it’s up to God.

Today I had 2 hours of driving lessons from 8 to 10. Right after that I went to the medical clinic to make blood tests.

Thanksfully blood taking procedure was fast and painless, it was kind from my mother to address me an hour, so when I went to the clinic I went directly to the lab where they took a blood sample from me.

A little later we went to “Banicharnica” which is a common cheap fast breakfast place here in Bulgaria. And after that we visited few shops and Bought some clothes. Now after a while I’ll have to go to the “DSK” bank and send the rest of the money which I owe for my room in the hostel in Holland.

And towards evening I have one more driving lesson. Tomorrow it’s my driving practical exam. It’s up to God’s will if I pass or fail. So I hope that God would be mercyful and send his word and grant me that exam, because I know by the word of Christ that without his divine mercy we alone can’t do anything.

END—–

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Posted in Everyday Life | No Comments »

Fix to mail forwarding error “Received-SPF: none (domain.com: domain at maildomain does not designate permitted sender hosts)

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

I’m Configuring a new Exim server to relay / forward mail via a remote Qmail SMTP server
Even though I configured properly the exim to forward via my relaying mail server with host mail.domain.com, still the mail forwarding from the Exim -> Qmail failed to work out with an error:

Fix to mail forwarding error "Received-SPF: none (domain.com: domain at maildomain does not designate permitted sender hosts)

I pondered for a while on what might be causing this “mysterous” error just to realize I forgot to add the IP address of my Exim mail server in the Qmail relay server

To solve the error I had to add in /etc/tcp.smtp on my Qmail server a record for my Exim server IP address xx.xx.xx.xx, like so:

debian-server:~# echo 'xx.xx.xx.xx:allow,RELAYCLIENT="",QS_SPAMASSASSIN="0"' >> /etc/tcp.smtp

The QS_SPAMASSASSIN=”0″ as you might have guessed instructs Qmail not to check the received mails originating from IP xx.xx.xx.xx with spamassassin.

Finally on the Qmail server to load up the new tcp.smtp settings I had to rebuild /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb and restart qmail :

– reload qmail cdb

linux-server:/var/qmail# qmailctl cdb
Reloaded /etc/tcp.smtp.
- restart qmail
linux-server:/var/qmail# qmailctl restart
Restarting qmail:
* Stopping qmail-smtpdssl.
* Stopping qmail-smtpd.
* Sending qmail-send SIGTERM and restarting.
* Restarting qmail-smtpd.
* Restarting qmail-smtpdssl.

This solved the issue and now mails are forwarded without problems via the Qmail SMTPD.

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Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, Qmail, System Administration, Various | No Comments »