Upgrade Whois

How to compile a newer Whois client
Since dreamhost runs an older version of debian, it comes with a whois client that's a bit out of date as well, it doesn't support newer TLDs like .eu and .mobi. However, if you use WHOIS as a part of your site, or through the shell, that can be limiting, and it's easy enough to compile a newer version.

- Download the whois source from Etch. wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/w/whois/whois_4.7.20.tar.gz

- Untar the file tar xzvf whois_4.7.20.tar.gz

- Change to the newly created directory cd whois-4.7.20 - Compile! make

The newly created executable file called "whois" is your program. I keep a ~/bin/ directory with all my custom scripts/binaries, so i dropped it in there, but you can just move it to your home directory if you like. To run it, instead of using whois domain.eu

just do: ~/bin/whois domain.eu