Monday, March 30, 2015

Installing dig and host on a Windows computer

I'm getting ready to teach a class on BIND DNS for a client. I thought you might find a quick and easy guide to installing the dig and host utilities on Windows systems helpful, so here it is.

To Install dig and host on a Windows Computer

The dig and host utilities are available for Windows computers. This guide assumes you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows. If you’re running a 32-bit system, the procedures are similar, but not the same.

Download the BIND package from www.isc.org/downloads. As of this writing, the recommended package is 9.10.2. Download the 64-bit version for Windows.

The download is a .zip file. Open the .zip file and copy the following files to %SystemRoot%\System32\ (copying files into %SystemRoot%\System32\ requires admin privileges):

  • dig.exe
  • host.exe
  • libbind9.dll
  • libdns.dll
  • libeay32.dll
  • libisc.dll
  • libisccfg.dll
  • liblwres.dll
  • libxml2.dll

The 64-bit version also requires the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable package, which is available at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30679#. Download it and install it before continuing.

Once you’ve installed the Visual C++ Redistributable package and copied the above files into System32, you can run dig and host from a command prompt. In the following screen capture, I ran a dig query in Windows Powershell.


Also, check out my Linux server book, based on CentOS 6.5/6.6 at http://amzn.com/1453689923