Drop catching scripting

[Ashton]

I have a bit of cash at the moment and I am tempted to get into drop catching. I can code php quite well and have experience of threads / proxies / bulk requests.

Can someone just outline a few details about drop catching before I take the jump:

- Will PHP be fast enough or do I need to code in something else to compete
- Will this cost more than £5,000 (If I script myself) to set up?
- Is catching saturated, ie: Are there xx catchers per dropping domain and you only get one every xxx attempts?
- Creating drop lists through scanning seems to be very time consuming, is creating the lists yourself a much better solution than using the >1,000 lists?
- How fast does my server have to be, I have a very good server at the moment but it is hosting several sites.

Please provide any information that you think will help, it will be good karma and ill owe you one feel free to pm, post or email

Thank you very much for any help in advance

- Ash

 

[stender]

you won't get much help on here with catching.
pm me tomorrow

 

[retired_member33]

Ashton, i have been thinking about catching as well but then for .nl domains so i wont be a competitor.

Perhaps we can get in touch and discuss the script and opportunities.

Allthough we will be using the script for different types of domains, registrars etc there might be some simmilarities in the script and we could be of help to eachother.

Send me a pm in case ur interested.

Cheers

 

[Ashton]

you won't get much help on here with catching.
pm me tomorrow

I was worried about that, but I like to think of the best in people. Despite being burnt several times! Ill drop you a pm tomorrow then


Bits found:

You connect to Dac and EPP, poll the dac for the domain name every 200ms and if it comes back available register via epp. You can try and vary the poll rate but the Nominet limits mean on average over the day you have 5 per second to play with.

http://www.nominet.org.uk/other/dac/ Interesting read.


Presumably you query the DAC and based on the response reg the name? (obviously all automatically)

 

[monaghan]

The drop script process is quite simple

write "domain.co.uk" to DAC
read reply
if reply = "domain.co.uk,N"
{
send EPP / Automaton register domain message
}
else
{
pause desired time so as not to exceed DAC limits
}


The skill is in the tweaking, server config, timings and so on, each of these bits are generally closely guarded secrets and you will no doubt have to go through many revisions before getting a good name.

Getting the "domain.co.uk,N" is the easy part, getting it before anyone else AND getting the registration request in first is the fun bit

PHP, C, PERL or virtually anything else should be OK, the script will be idle for most of the time in delay loops so as not to exceed DAC quotas.

 

[Ashton]

Thank you, interesting.

So its all in the tweaking to make sure

a) your the first one to query it when it becomes available
b) your sending your requests as fast as possible without exceeding quota

So if i am right, then in theory:

Your querying a domain every 200ms
If a domain is 'dropped' after 100ms
Then there is the whole next 100ms before your query and request.
Not to mention how long it takes you turn around from that query and register it.

So taking that into account, there are three things to consider?

1) Timing, a lot of it is all related to timing, if you have queried only a ms before the domain becomes available, then you have missed it because you have a 200ms gap before your next query, which someone is bound to be in.

2) Return of registration request once the domain is available, so how fast your script is at understanding the data sent to it, and responding to that data.

3) Making sure that you are doing it at EXACTLY the limit, so as to have maximum chance, whilst not getting banned.

Hmmm....

Do some catchers utilise multiple tags to request the same name and increase likelihood of them getting it (if they 'stagger' their requests)

ie: If I had 3 tags and the requests went

1: Request at 0 ms
2: Request at 70 ms
3: Request at 140 ms
1: Request at 200 ms
2: Request at 270 ms
3. Request at 340 ms
and so on

Would this not make sense or is it prohibited?

 

[monaghan]

Technically you can only have 1 DAC allocation per organisation, however, I'm sure that there are linked TAG's that are not on Nominet's radar yet. Multiple DAC quotas would of course give you a huge advantage as you rightly suggest you can decrease the gap between requests.

 

[Ashton]

Thank you for your help Alex, I appreciate it!

 

[monaghan]

No problem, of course you read the small print in my post saying you have to defer all good names to my EPP login

 

[davedevelopment]

To add to what everyone else has said, unless you're going to bill your time, it wont cost you anything near £5000.

Yes it's very competitive, but going through the lists isn't too difficult and as long as you're in it, you may just win it!

You've got the right idea with regard to where the system needs to be quick, I spent way too long trying to write a script that was totally optimised start to finish, when realistically you just need the send dac, receive dac, send epp to be lightning.

You don't need much in terms of server hardware/capacity, it's all about the networking.

 

[monaghan]

Agreed, you can use the delay loop to do housekeeping tasks.