Friday, February 11, 2005

How to Troubleshoot DNS Issues with "nslookup"

Nslookup is a very handy and often underutilized tool for assisting in name resolution issues. Nslookup runs in most (if not all) systems utilizing TCP/IP. It allows you to query a name server for various types of information concerning the name resolution process. Try this command at a command prompt:

nslookup [hostnamefully qualified domain name]
This command will display the nameserver for the domain and the IP address of the host.

Or try this:
nslookup
The command by itself starts the nslookup service. The prompt is “>”.

>ls [domain name]
This command will display a listing of hosts in the domain with their IP addresses.

Although many in the Linux/UNIX community prefer to use “dig”, nslookup is the most commonly available of all the DNS troubleshooting tools and is supported on most OS platforms.

Want to know more about using nslookup, dig, and other DNS troubleshooting tools? Check out our BIND DNS one-day workshop. It’s now available for onsite scheduling at your location. Call us at 206.988.5858 to schedule your workshop.

No comments: