The disgusting and useless nslookup

[Paul Jacobs]

To bad red had and a number of other *nix platforms are trying to phase it 
out huh?!


At 11:46 AM 5/25/2001, Christopher L. Barnard wrote:

>There is unfortunately another big reason that it is still there.  We all know
>not to use it.  But the rest of the world that want to do a quick "dns lookup"
>will use nslookup.  Telling these people to use "getent hosts" or "host" or
>"dig" is like speaking to a blank wall.
>
>Speaking of nslookup, I have to admit that I still occasionally use it.  The
>reason I use it is for one purpose:  I want to know if a short hostname is
>being resolved properly, and I want to know what nameserver it is using if it
>needs one (basically, the first "nameserver" line in the /etc/resolv.conf).
>I'm curious to know how other people accomplish this (this is for a Sun
>machine running Solaris 2.large, if it matters)
>
>+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
>| Christopher L. Barnard         O     When I was a boy I was told that |
>| cbarnard at tsg.cbot.com         / \    anybody could become president.  |
>| (312) 347-4901               O---O   Now I'm beginning to believe it. |
>| http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/~cbarnard                --Clarence Darrow |
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>
>
> > >>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad.knowles at skynet.be> writes:
> >
> >     Brad>     I have to assume that it is for reasons like this that
> >     Brad> "nslookup" is completely gone from more recent versions of
> >     Brad> BIND.  Good riddance!
> >
> > It is still there alas. IIRC the BIND9 developers did discuss dropping
> > nslookup for BIND9 but were obliged to provide it, possibly for
> > contractual reasons. There are a lot of legacy scripts in use that
> > depend on this dismal tool unfortunately. So nslookup lives on. At
> > least the BIND9 version of nslookup prints a nice little message
> > telling you to use a decent lookup tool instead:
> >
> >     % nslookup
> >     Note:  nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
> >     Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead.  Run nslookup with
> >     the `-sil[ent]' option to prevent this message from appearing.
> >
> > nslookup is like something from a Dracula horror film. It's not alive,
> > but it's not dead either. But it keeps coming back to haunt you. And
> > everyone's bored with it and wishes it went away forever. :-)

Best regards,
Paul Jacobs /Senior Network Eng.
NETPACQ Systems, Inc.
"Full Service Web Media"
http://www.netpacq.com
mailto:paul at netpacq.com