GeekTools

» see geektools.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Windows never shipped a whois command. That single gap is most of why web whois gateways existed, and why, on a Turkish dial-up connection in 1999, I looked up domain owners through a form in a browser rather than a terminal. You typed a name into a box on somebody else's website and it came back with who had registered it and when the registration ran out.

GeekTools was one of those boxes, and by its own account the first good one. "We started this service in 1998 as the first smart whois that would automatically query the correct server(s) to get the data you need," reads the notice it finally put up. The smart part is the part worth explaining, because it sounds like nothing now.

Its origin, written on the site for years, was less grand. Centergate Research Group built a page of the external tools its own engineers kept needing, and assigned a couple of people to keep the links working as things moved and died around the net. Friends started using it, so they opened it to anybody, with the house rule printed underneath: use it, but don't abuse it. Enhancement requests went to an email address. Real complaints, the page said, went to /dev/null.

~ the case file ~

~ what made a whois smart ~

Whois was never one database. Before 1999 Network Solutions held the registry for com and the other main generic domains, and once ICANN opened registrar competition the registry's answer became a pointer to whichever registrar held the name, so you needed a second lookup to learn anything useful. Every country-code domain ran its own server with its own output format and its own rules about what it would tell you. Point a naive query at the wrong host and you got nothing back, with no hint about where to ask instead. GeekTools kept the referral logic, followed the chain, and returned the record. That was the whole product, and for twenty-five years it was worth a bookmark.

~ twenty-five years of answering ~

There is not much of a story in the middle, and that is the compliment. The page stayed plain by design, built to work in any browser at any resolution, and it carried a traceroute tool beside the whois one. Its footer credited Centergate for 1998 through 2020 by the time it stopped. It outlasted the registrar landscape it was built for, and it kept working after GDPR pushed registrars into redacting most of the interesting fields out of whois output in 2018. RDAP, the structured protocol meant to replace whois, arrived while GeekTools was still serving a web form.

~ the sign-off ~

On 10 May 2023 the tools were replaced with a short notice. A lot has changed since 1998, it said, and it was time to move on, because most modern command line clients on unix-like systems will select the appropriate whois server themselves. Then comes the line that gives it away as the work of engineers who had been at this a long while, telling readers to check their system's man page, "for those of you who don't know what a man page is". It signed off: "It's been a good run, and thanks for using this service over the years."

Hacker News found it that same evening and gave it 137 points. The archive crawled the new page twenty-eight seconds after that story went up, so this death date needs no bracketing at all. geektools.com has since stopped resolving altogether, with no address record on either scheme, so the last thing you cannot look up through GeekTools is GeekTools. One disambiguation for anyone searching: GeekTool, singular, is a different product, a Mac desktop widget, and it is not dead.

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