Purpose

The purpose of the Whois Selftest Tool is to help gTLD applicants prepare for Pre-Delegation Testing (PDT) by providing pre-PDT Whois output validation.

Scope

While Whois Selftest Tool does validate Whois output and it does strive to reflect the state of PDT Whois output validation, it is not authoritative on the outcome of PDT and it is subject to change.

Disclaimer

The Whois Selftest Tool and the actual Whois testing under PDT are not equal. We strive to make the two as equal as possible, but here is no guarantee that successfully running the Whois Selftest Tool means that the same Whois system will pass the Whois testing under PDT. For example, the parts of Whois tests under Whois that include DNS lookups and TCP connections are not included in the Whois Selftest Tool. For a complete reference of the Whois tests under PDT see the PDT Whois documents.

Version history

• v1.0.0 - Initial public release (2015-12-03)

Specification compatibility matrix

Refer to this compatibility matrix when deciding which version of Whois Selftest Tool to use.

Whois Selftest Tool version	PDT Test Specifications
v1.0.0	v.2.8

Roadmap

The plan is to solve know issues and any bugs of importance before the stricter Whois testing is enforced at 2016-01-31. New versions will be released when fixes are stable.

References

The Pre-Delegation Testing microsite hosts the following documents relevant to the Whois Selftest Tool:

• The PDT_Whois_TC_CLI and PDT_Whois_TC_Web documents, within the PDT Test Specifications zip, specifies the test cases that the Whois Selftest Tool partially implements.
• The PDT_Whois_TP document, within the PDT Test Specifications zip, specifies the format specification that the Whois Selftest Tool implements.

In the PDT_Whois_TP you can find references to other useful documents.

Licensing

Whois Selftest Tool is distributed under the terms of this license.

Dependencies

• Ubuntu Linux version 12.04
• Perl, version 5.14 or higher
• Standard Perl libraries found on CPAN.org
  • DateTime
  • File::Slurp
  • File::Which
  • Net::IDN::Encode
  • Net::IP
  • Readonly
  • Regexp::IPv6
  • Test::Differences
  • Test::MockObject
  • Text::CSV
  • Text::CSV_XS
  • URI
  • YAML::Syck
• wget

The Whois Selftest Tool has been developed on Unbuntu Linux, but we have tried to avoid Linux specific coding. There is, however, no guarantee that it works on other OSs.

Installation

Clone the project repository and choose version according to the specification compatibility matrix.

$> git clone https://github.com/dotse/Whois-Selftest-Tool.git <installdir>
$> cd <installdir>
$> git checkout <version>

<installdir> is assumed to be in the PATH in code examples throughout the rest of this document.

Create a program directory <programdir> to install Whois Selftest Tool in, and copy the scripts and libraries there.

$> cd <somewhere>
$> mkdir <programdir>
$> cp <installdir>/script/* <programdir>/
$> cp -r <installdir>/lib/PDT <programdir>/

Now the script is installed and can be run from <programdir>. To check the installation run the scripts with --help.

$> cd <programdir>
$> ./whois-test --help
$> ./whois-fetch-epp-repo-ids --help

Before use

Before you use the tool, make sure that you have read the documents listed in the reference above. Some error messages may be difficult to understand without referring to the PDT_Whois_TP document.

Usage

The Whois Selftest Tool provides the two commands whois-fetch-epp-repo-ids and whois-test. If you have followed the installation above, always go to your <programdir> and run the commands from there or else the scripts will not be able to find its libraries in the PDT directory. You probably have to prepend the commands with ./ just as in the instructions above.

whois-fetch-epp-repo-ids fetches the EPP Repository Identifiers registered with IANA and stores them in a text file inside the user's home directory.

whois-test validates the Whois responses according to the format specification in the PDT_Whois_TP document.

The database of EPP Repository Identifiers is a prerequisite for running whois-test command, so whois-fetch-epp-repo-ids must be run at least once before whois-test is used for the first time. After that, run whois-fetch-epp-repo-ids again to update the database every time the Whois Selfttest Tool is to be used.

See the man pages for the respective commands for details on how to run them. (You can use the --man option to view the man pages)

Known issues

• The Perl library that converts between IDN U-label and IDN A-label, Net::IDN::encode, will magically make upper-case characters into its equivalent lower-case characters. The upper-case characters are not valid in a U-label. This issue can make false positive validations of Whois responses when the "Internationalized Domain Name" field is present in a Domain Object response.

• Perl 5.14 only supports Unicode 6.0.0. If an "Internationalized Domain Name" field contains code points available in Unicode 6.3.0 but not in Unicode 6.0.0, and valid for IDNA, then they will incorrectly be reported as invalid.

Reporting bugs

If you think you've found a bug, please search both the list of known issues and the issue tracker to see if this is a known bug. If you cannot find it, please report it to the issue tracker.