nslookup sucks (was Re: [Fwd: newbie nameserver])

Barry Margolin barmar at bbnplanet.com
Tue Jan 18 16:30:16 UTC 2000


In article <388428CF.70BBFC1C at anta.net>, Thor Kottelin  <thor at anta.net> wrote:
>My favorite DNS client is nslookup.

Why?  If I want brief output I use "host".  If I want details I use "dig".
nslookup is the worst query tool -- its order for querying servers is
different from the real resolvers, it produces confusing error messages
(how many times have we seen people ask about it aborting when it can't
reverse resolve the server's address?), it doesn't distinguish between a
name not existing and the record type not existing for the name, etc.  The
only feature it has is its ubiquity -- it's included with most versions of
Unix and NT.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.



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