The Admins

For all those who are new to whois:

"WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query/response protocol that is widely used for querying databases in order to determine the registrant or assignee of Internet resources, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system number." - Wikipedia

Microsoft Windows Operating Systems does not have a inbuilt whois utility. However, you can download a small whois utility from Microsoft Technet (Windows Sysinternals) to carry out a whois search.

Steps to follow:

• Navigate to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897435.aspx
• Download whois.zip from http://download.sysinternals.com/Files/Whois.zip.
• Unzip the file whois.zip.
• Open command prompt.
• Navigate to the directory where you extracted the zip file.
• Execute the command in the following format:

whois domainname [whois.server]

where domainname can be either a DNS name (e.g. www.abc.com) or IP address (e.g. 11.22.11.22)

A 45-minute video containing tips from Tom Limoncelli's new book, "Time Management For System Administrators".

What is IRC?

From Wikipedia:

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a form of real-time Internet chat or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group (many-to-many) communication in discussion forums called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication and data transfers via private message.

The easiest way to get connected to The Admins IRC Chat channel is to navigate to http://chat.theadmins.info. However this method provides only a web-based interface and the user won't be able to exploit the full feature of IRC.

How to get started with an IRC Client?

To start using IRC we need a client application / interface. In this tutorial, we will use Chatzilla - an addon for FireFox web browser.