DCHK Client Version 0.5.7 - Documentation
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DCHK Client Documentation
0.5.7
DCHK is the abbreviation of DomainavailabilityCHecK, and is an IRIS based protocol to query domain status. It is meant as a more formal replacement of the whois protocol.
Advantages of DCHK compared to whois:
- DCHK supports international domain names (IDN) with country specific characters by default, because it is based on UTF-8 / UTF-16 (Unicode)
- Formal request and answer by using XML
- UDP-protocol is simpler and faster than TCP
- request and answer can be compressed
- several domains can be queried with one request
Disadvantages:
- UDP is unreliable
- UDP-packet size is limited. An IRIS-LWZ request or answer must fit into a single UDP packet. If the "path MTU" is not known the packet must not exceed 1500 bytes, otherwise it can be as big as the MTU but not bigger than 4000 bytes.
- XML is more difficult to handle
This software contains a client implementation of the IrisLWZ- and DCHK-protocol, written in C and C++. It is divided in three parts:
- a library, which you can use in your own programs
- a command line client
- a graphical user interface (GUI)
As DCHK is a quite new protocol, the library contains some features to manipulate requests, which are not useful for general usage, but might be of some use if you want to test a servers behavior.
The library and clients are placed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (see License).
- CRISP-Charter
- RFC 3707 - Cross Registry Internet Service Protocol (CRISP) - Requirements
- RFC 3981 - The Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) Core Protocol
- RFC 3983 - Using the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) over the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol (BEEP)
- RFC 5144 - A Domain Availability Check (DCHK) Registry Type for the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS)
- RFC 4993 - A Lightweight UDP Transfer Protocol for the the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS)
- RFC 4698 - An Address Registry (AREG) Type for the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS)