Tuesday, February 15, 2005

How to Troubleshoot DNS Issues with "dig"

“dig” is the domain information groper. You can use dig to query DNS servers for information concerning hostnames and servers. You may be familiar with nslookup (see the previous blog entry), an older utility that does much the same thing. dig uses a clearer, easier to understand command structure and is generally more stable than nslookup, so it is the recommended tool for querying name servers. At this time, dig is not supported in Windows, but it is supported in most Linux distros and most versions of UNIX.

Using dig

#dig [server to query] [name to be looked up] [type of query (if not specified, dig will perform a lookup for an A RR)].

Common uses of dig

  • #dig [fully qualified domain name] will provide information about the IP address of the specified host as well as information about the nameservers associated with that host.
  • #dig -x [IP address] will do a reverse lookup and provide information about the host at that IP address.

Of course, for more information about dig, check out the man or info pages. As with nslookup, you can get more information about dig and other DNS tools in our BIND DNS one-day seminar. It’s now available for onsite scheduling at your location. Call us at 206.988.5858 to schedule your seminar.

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