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The ProVision WHOIS Server is a thin client for our REST API that listens on port 43 and accepts WHOIS requests that gets forwarded to our API. It is written in Python 3 using the socketserver module, and uses the ProVision endpoint /api/ipam/whois to receive all requests from the WHOIS server.

The main business logic is located in services/WhoisService.php

Running the Server manually

The Python requests library must first be installed:

Ubuntu:

sudo apt install -y python3-pip
pip3 install requests

CentOS / Alma Linux:

sudo yum install python3-pip OR sudo dnf install python3-pip
pip3 install requests

The server is located at whois_server/main.py in the ProVision repository.

Open main.py and update these variables:

self.url = "https://localhost/qa-7.4.0/api/v2/ipam/whois"
self.username = "apiUserName"
self.password = "apiPassword"

to match the current API location and credentials, so the WHOIS requests can be properly forwarded to our API.

Running the server can be done with: sudo python3 main.py (We need root because we are binding to port 43)

Quering the WHOIS server

1. install whois if not present (sudo apt-get install whois)
2. whois -h 127.0.0.1 ﹤query﹥

Installing the WHOIS server as a service

Different Linux distributions might have different ways to setup a service that runs on startup.

systemd

There is a Unit file for systemd in the repository: whois_server/provision_whois.service that is used when a service is created in systemd env.

1) Edit the file to setup the proper path to the python server/file

ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /root/whois_server/main.py
WorkingDirectory=/root/whois_server/

2) Copy the file to /etc/systemd/system (on CentOS this directory should be: /lib/systemd/system/) -

sudo cp whois_server/provision_whois.service /etc/systemd/system/provision_whois.service

3) Start the service with service provision_whois start

4) Verify that is working with service provision_whois status and making a test query whois -h 127.0.0.1 ﹤query﹥

The systemd services are run as root, so there shouldn't be issues with binding to port 43.

init.d

There is also init.d file located at whois_server/provision_whois

1) Edit the file to setup the proper path to the python server/file

DAEMON_OPTS="/var/www/projects/whois/app.py"

2) Copy the file to /etc/init.d/

3) chmod +x /etc/init.d/provision_whois -v

4) Verify that is working with service provision_whois status and making a test query whois -h 127.0.0.1 ﹤query﹥