Microsoft's nslookup Implementation Problems

[Doug Barton]

On 06/13/10 14:08, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
>
> On Jun 13, 2010, at 1:08 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
>
>> On 06/13/10 13:00, Merton Campbell Crockett wrote:
>>> Microsoft's nslookup is broken. What alternative applications that can
>>> be installed and used in a Windows XP environment that will continue to
>>> work in a Windows 7 environment after a decision is made to upgrade
>>> Windows?
>>
>> In the past I've installed nslookup and dig from the BIND package for
>> windows to solve this problem.
>
> You wouldn't happen to know when Microsoft's implementation became
> hopelessly broken would you?

Well given my anti-microsoft bias, my natural answer is "at conception" 
but that's not particularly helpful for you, sorry. :)

> Being, primarily, a Linux/Unix user; I tend not to use nslookup except
> when logged into a Windows system. It has to be several years since I
> last used nslookup until the last few days.

http://dougbarton.us/DNS/bind-users-FAQ.html#nslookup-evil

> The problem with the erroneous functioning of Microsoft's nslookup.exe
> is that it requires a corporate wide change. There are a number of
> reasonably intelligent users that assume nslookup.exe is providing them
> correct information. I would need to convince management that it needs
> to be replaced with the ISC version or convince them to deploy DiG to
> all systems. Deploying DiG might be the easier as it doesn't replace
> something distributed by Microsoft. At the same time, the tool that
> users are familiar with is broken. It needs to be replaced. This will be
> a "hard sale" to management.

That's a different scale of problem than what you originally described. 
:)  Without knowing more about your internal political/support/etc. 
structure it's hard to be sure what the "right" answer is. However if 
the scope is not "replace/augment nslookup for a few support techs" but 
rather "find a way to give a large number of, possibly non-technical 
users the right answers" then I would suggest that perhaps setting up an 
internal web page that explains the problem in the simplest possible 
terms, and provides a CGI with access to a working version of nslookup 
and/or dig so that they can get the answers they need might do the trick.


hth,

Doug

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