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I have a vendor who is supposed to setup a domain name in their DNS system. What can I use ti hit it and see what it responds to as the IP for mydomain.example.com is? I essentially want to make sure they have configured the A record correctly.

Windows, Linux, any tool / command line will do. Thanks!

Joel Coel
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Ryan Doom
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3 Answers3

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nslookup is quirky and often gives misleading answers. Its authors (ISC) recommend not using it.

The standard tool is therefore dig:

% dig mydomain.example.com. A
....

That will check via your configured recursive resolvers.

If you want to check the contents of a specific server, i.e. the name servers for your domain, add @server_name or @server_ip to the parameters:

% dig @server mydomain.example.com. A
Alnitak
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  • Thanks Alnitak this worked wonderfully and yes! So much better than NSlookup. This will give me a lot more confidence when switching over to new DNS servers when their IT people say 'yes we have added the DNS entries' - I've had it in the past where they mess them up and when we switch the DNS at the domain to make a client's site live it breaks. Obviously it makes us look bad, so this way I can check their work! – Ryan Doom Dec 14 '11 at 01:47
4

On Windows you can use nslookup.

Run nslookup in interactive mode, set the server you want to use to answer your query, set the nosearch option to eliminate queries with your DNS suffix(es) appended to them, and set the debug option or the debug2 option for more detailed results in the answers returned.

joeqwerty
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0

You want nslookup

This tool will let you set the vendor's DNS server (assuming you can reach it) as the resolver and tell you what that server returns for a given name lookup.

Joel Coel
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  • No, [xe really doesn't want `nslookup`](http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/nslookup-flaws.html). – JdeBP Jan 20 '12 at 15:25