Issue with .co.za availability lookup

[peakhostingza]

Hi everyone, been struggling with this one. Setting up a new instance of WHMCS for the South African market and am not having any luck with .co.za lookups. 

- Using the WHMCS Namespinning lookup provider it always says unavailable
- Using the standard lookup tool it does the same
- Using ZADomains as a lookup tool (installed and configured as a domain registrar) doesn't work for any TLD, just shows indefinited loading icons
- eNom didn't work
- Hexonet didn't work (I have accounts with all the above and they're configured)

The official WHOIS server for the co.za name space appears to be unresponsive, I tried overriding the server being used in the whois.json file.

I'm not sure what else I can try at this point, and looking through this community all references to .co.za domains date back to 2016 or earlier and are on WHMCS v6 or before. I'm using the latest, v7.8.3 which seems to have changed a bit.

Any advice would be appreciated, I'm sure there's a simple solution that's just not well documented or something hence I can't find it

[brian!]

23 hours ago, peakhostingza said:

Any advice would be appreciated, I'm sure there's a simple solution that's just not well documented or something hence I can't find it

i'm not seeing the error that you're seeing with v7.8.3 - if I search for a domain in the admin area, let's say livebusiness.co.za (first one I found on google), then WHMCS finds that it's registered..

if I then try businesslive222.co.za, it's available...

NameSpinning should be irrelevant as I think as eNom don't sell .co.za domains and so it's defaulting to using the whois server entry in dist.whois.json.

I would try deleting any .co.za entry in your custom whois.json file and rely on the entry in dist.whois.json - if that's not working, then you could check that port 43 is open on your server... is this affecting any other TLDs or only .co.za ??