DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

Chapter 12. nslookup

“Don’t stand chattering to yourself like that,” Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, “but tell me your name and your business.”

“My name is Alice, but—”

“It’s a stupid name enough!” Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. “What does it mean?”

“Must a name mean something?” Alice asked doubtfully.

“Of course it must,” Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh....

To be proficient at troubleshooting name server problems, you’ll need a special tool to make DNS queries, one that gives you complete control. We’ll cover nslookup in this chapter because it’s distributed with Windows 2000 and with many other operating systems.

Note that this chapter isn’t comprehensive; there are aspects of nslookup -- mostly obscure and seldom used—that we won’t cover. You can always consult the manual pages for information on those aspects.

Is nslookup a Good Tool?

Much of the time you’ll use nslookup to make queries in the same way the resolver makes them. Sometimes, though, you’ll use nslookup to query other name servers as a name server would. Which one you emulate will depend on the problem you’re trying to debug. You might wonder, “How accurately does nslookup emulate a resolver or a name server? Does nslookup actually use the Windows resolver library routines?” No, nslookup uses its own routines for querying name servers, but those routines are based on the resolver routines. Consequently, nslookup’s behavior is very similar to the resolver’s behavior, but it does ...