A while after having my current job, my boss decided to bestow upon me the great task of printing out all of our DNS entries (300 or so - a hosting company). Of course he told me that there was no "easy" way, and to just print them page by page (BACKGROUND: we use a colbat qube for our DNS, so this was done via a pretty web GUI). 300 entries later, I was done, but now he wanted the whois report for every one! ugh! I wasn't going to take this on up the butt. I got the dns entries from the box (the actually files from /etc/named), and made a list with them using perl (Victory 1). Then I needed to do a whois on everyone and print it out.

Boss: I know of this ASP whois program that would work good for this a
+nd it only costs $40!
Me: Funk that. We use perl.
[download]

So I decided to get tricky. I went to CPAN, and found a few Whois modules (I ended up on Net::Whois::Raw, hehe, this is before I knew about the unix whois command though :/ ), then I found out our OkiData printer had a print server with an open TCP/IP port! Yay! A little bit of help from IO::Socket (/me drools), cacharbe, and OkiData's support site, I had a script that printed out 300 whois' in one nite! w00t! He normally asks me first before considering asp now :)

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s mmgfbs nf, nfyojy m,tr yb-zya-zy,s zfzphz,print;

mexnix.perlmonk.org

Edit by tye to change PRE around long lines to CODE