jwhois not working

Question

I have installed jwhois on many systems, but can't get it to work. The port 43 is open through the firewall and I can do a telnet to the whois server on port 43, but whenver I run jwhois I get the following error:

[Querying whoisserver]
[Unable to connect to remote host]

Any idea on how to fix this issue?

Answer 1

This is Debian Bug 542148.

Not fixed in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS unfortunately.

Answer 2

For 10.04:

1. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/jwhois/4.0-2
2. Download jwhois_4.0.orig.tar.gz to /usr/local/src.
3. Extract and apply patch:

   cd /usr/local/src
   tar zxf jwhois_4.0.orig.tar.gz
   cd jwhois*
   wget "https://launchpadlibrarian.net/59543349/jwhois_4.0-2.diff.gz"
   gunzip *.gz
   patch < jwhois_4.0-2.diff
   

Then apply the fix for .com lookups:

1. Visit http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=542148
2. Edit src/utils.c.
3. Change line 291 to:

   if (error < 0 || !retval)
   

Compile and install as usual:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make && make install