Whois
======

Server location
----------------

The host name for the WHOIS server is:

.. code-block:: xml

 whois.irs.net.nz


OTE Whois Server Location
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

.. code-block:: xml

 whois.ote.irs.net.nz


The WHOIS server only operates on port 43.


Request Limit
-----------------

Requests to the whois server are restricted to 10 per second per IP address.


Query Format
-------------

The query consists of a single domain name/name server ending in “nz”. No wildcards are permitted and the query string is used literally to match a domain name/name server in the register.

The domain name/name server in the query must be a well formed name. A trailing full stop (.) indicating an absolute domain name should not be present. If it is present the query will be rejected.

The server accepts queries in UTF-8 or in ASCII. If the query is in UTF-8 then it may include the Unicode characters for the macronised vowels (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū) natively, otherwise IDN domains must be queried for in Punycode.

The query string must not begin with a hyphen (-) (domain names may not begin with a hyphen anyway). Query strings beginning with a hyphen are reserved for future expansion, to allow passing “command line” flags to the whois server. Currently no flags are defined or permitted.

Query strings that do not match the input format will be rejected with an error response: error code and associated human readable error message, as described below.

Response Format
----------------

The response consists of a series of UTF-8 encoded lines, terminated by CR LF pairs. There are two types of lines in the response format:

#.  Field-value lines containing a response field on a single line. These are described below
#.  Comment lines identified by an initial percentage symbol (%). The comment lines are intended for human consumption and need not be decoded by a program interacting with the whois server. However they should be displayed to the user initiating the query.

Fields
-------

The following is a list of all possible field-value fields. 

There is no provision for fields to be wrapped onto a second line; all data associated with a given field will be on the same line. The maximum likely length of a field varies from field to field, but no fields will be longer than 1024 characters.

**Domain response fields**

For a domain name query, the domain values for name, status, creation date, original creation date, updated date and registrar  will always be present. All other domain values that are not displayed are either due to .nz policy rules or it means they contain no data.

Full domain details may be available via the domain search tool on the `DNCL website <https://dnc.org.nz/whois/whois-lookup/>`_


.. csv-table:: **Domain Response Fields**
   :file: domainresponsefields.csv
   :widths: 10, 60, 20
   :header-rows: 1


**Name server response fields**

For a name server query, the values for name saver and registrar  will always be present. All other domain values that are not displayed means they contain no data.


.. csv-table:: **Name Server Response Fields**
   :file: nsresponsefields.csv
   :widths: 10, 40
   :header-rows: 1


**Status codes and Error codes**

The following table lists the error codes and messages that Whois generates to notify you of any problems or errors with your query.

.. csv-table:: **Status codes and Error codes**
   :file: statusanderrorcodes.csv
   :widths: 10, 60
   :header-rows: 1