Domain expiration reminder

[Mur]

Greetings.

I'm in need of a script that I could run periodically (say, from cron) that would accept a list of domain names and identify those which are expiring. No, this isn't a claim-jumping application; this is an effort to protect our clients from claim-jumping where they (or their domain registration service) isn't clueful enough to do it. Obviously, some kind of query against "whois" is necessary. The trick is parsing the various and sundry formats returned. I'd do it myself, but I'd prefer to start with something that is at least partway there.

Querying my friend Google results in 2.5 million hits, which seem to be all about shareware or commercial software to implement claim-jumping ...

[mk.]

you could try Net::Domain::ExpireDate.

[Mur]

Ah, thanks! I did in fact do a CPAN query as well as Google. As usual, it's all about picking the right search keywords, and I didn't.

[gellyfish]

It seems a little wasteful going to the network continuously to query whois to determine something that changes relatively infrequently. I would recommend using one of the modules that you have been recommended to do an initial query of whois and store that somewhere you can query locally. The really smart money would be on using one of the iCal modules to generate alarms in your favourite calendar program or those of your clients at an appropriate time before the expiry. Less is more.

/J\

[mreece]

when it comes to reminders two years in the future, i'll trust a cron job over iCal anyday! workstations are practically disposable, but my servers, they tend to live on forever. ;)

[gellyfish]

Now this is where Google Calendar comes in :-)

/J\