Reverse Lookup Query...

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Tue Jan 16 15:06:34 UTC 2001


>>>>> "Ron" == Wallingford, Ron <Ron.Wallingford at genosys.net> writes:

    Ron> I have installed Bind 8.2.2 on Solaris.  I have no
    Ron> appreciable errors in the syslog.  I can (from my dns server)
    Ron> do a SUCCESSFUL nslookup of say, www.cisco.com
    Ron> <http://www.cisco.com> , however my ADDRESS of my
    Ron> localhost/Name server is 0.0.0.0.  

That's probably because you've not set up /etc/resolv.conf to tell the
resolver used by things like nslookup where they should send their
queries. When this happens, the wildcard IP address 0.0.0.0 is used
and the queries usually go via the loopback interface. Luckily for you
the local machine happens running a name server, so the queries get
answered, even if sometimes that answer is NXDOMAIN: "the name being
looked up does not exist".

Your next problem is nslookup. Don't use it. It's abysmal. Use dig for
making DNS queries. nslookup has lots of annoying quirks which mean
you'll spend more time dealing with its deficiencies instead of
checking and testing the configuration of your name server. dig is a
far, far better tool. And you'll get to see the complete answer -
headers, each section - from the name server too.

Another problem you have is reverse lookups of your server's IP
address, 212.161.103.238, don't work. These don't return the hostname
of your server. In fact, they return nothing. [BTW, this is one of the
irritating things about nslookup. It prints an unhelpful and confusing
error message and then dies if it can't do a reverse lookup of the
server it queries.] The reverse zone - 103.161.212.in-addr.arpa -
appears to be empty. You'll need to talk to your ISP and/or the zone's
administrator (hostmaster at uk.colt.net) to arrange for reverse lookups
of this IP address to work.



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