The whois command on your Mac is perfectly fine.
You're simply querying a different NICNAME server with each tool. The BSD whois
tool in MacOS 10 uses the whois-servers.net.
mechanism, and in this case is querying the com.whois-servers.net.
NICNAME server, run by Verisign Incorporated. Other people's computers are using a different whois
command that probably hardwires whois.networksolutions.com.
, run by Network Solutions LLC, as the NICNAME server.
What you see is what the different NICNAME servers are actually publishing. This is nothing to do with your client tool at all. People have actually registered all of those. Note what the MacOS manual says about the Network Solutions NICNAME server. You're querying the registry's NICNAME server, and seeing a whole load of registrations made through several different registrars, from MarkMonitor to Tucows. The other people are querying one registrar's NICNAME server, and seeing only the registrations made through that specific registrar.
Run
whois '=google.com'with the BSD
whois
tool and you'll receive extended output from the registry's NICNAME server showing where each registrar's individual NICNAME server is. (The output in your question tells you this very trick.) Again, this is a server-side function, and not all NICNAME servers work the same way — as you can see if you try the same trick with the Network Solutions LLC NICNAME server. One of the reasons that whois
commands vary is that the days of there being one place, or even a few places, to go for NICNAME service are long past. You're using one of the more modern whois
tools that uses one of two available DNS mechanisms to automatically locate the NICNAME server to use for any given domain name. Other, clunkier and higher-maintenance, whois
tools have hardwired NICNAME server names, or configuration files that need regular servicing.
Further reading
- Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (2010).
whois
. Internet Utilities for OS/2 user guide. whois
. 2004-06-14. MacOS 10 Manual Pages. Apple corporation.- Marco d'Itri.
whois
. Ubuntu manual pages. Canonical. - "Site Configuration". GNU
jwhois
manual. Free Software Foundation. - Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (2009). "NICNAME clients that use SRV lookups". Some application clients use SRV lookups, a few (to their embarrassment) do not.. Frequently Given Answers.
- Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (2009). Providing your own NICNAME service.. Frequently Given Answers.