getaddrinfo(whois.verisign-grs.com): Name or service not known

Question

I tried to WHOIS a domain name, sans.org, but I get the following error:

getaddrinfo(whois.pir.org): Name or service not known.

And then I tried to WHOIS tiffany.com and get a similar error:

getaddrinfo(whois.verisign-grs.com): Name or service not known.

What does getaddrinfo imply and what are whois.pir.org and whois.virusigngrs.com?

Pretty new to linux and WHOIS lookups. Thanks!

Answer 1

I had a similar problem in Docker environment with only whois installed but I've been able to find an another solution. After installing netbase, whois is working as expected.

    $ docker run -it --rm ubuntu:18.04 bash
    root@docker# apt update && apt -y install whois
    root@docker# whois google.com
    > getaddrinfo(whois.verisign-grs.com): Servname not supported for ai_socktype
    root@docker# apt -y install netbase
    root@docker# whois google.com
    > Domain Name: GOOGLE.COM
    > Registry Domain ID: 2138514_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
    > ...

This is not Docker related, but it helped me stretch down this problem.