looking up rr.com associated ptr and a records (problem?)

[Andrew Brown]

On Mon, Oct 01, 2001 at 09:30:49AM +0100, Jim Reid wrote:
>>>>>> "Greg" == Greg A Woods <woods at weird.com> writes:
>
>    Greg> (I think 'dig' is extremely ugly and archane -- and it has
>    Greg> very few automated verification and validation tools
>    Greg> built-in, things I find invaluable in 'host', such as '-C',
>    Greg> '-A', '-E', '-D', etc.)
>
>This is why dig is so useful IMHO. It shows you exactly what was in
>the DNS packet: no more, no less. Automated verification and
>valudation tools are all very well -- assuming they can be made to
>always work properly which is debatable. However these tools can be a
>hindrance rather than a help. Instead of debugging the real problem,
>someone could be stuck trying to debug the idiosyncracies or
>assumptions of those tools. [Remember how nslookup (spit!) fails if
>it can't reverse lookup the server it queries?] Note that I'm not
>saying that these fancy options are host are broken, whatever it is
>they do. They're just not as valuable as analysing a name server's
>responses with dig.

i have to agree with jim.  dig is very useful in that it asks what you
tell it to, and tells you what it got as an answer.  otoh, i always
rationalized nslookup's failing if it can't get the name of the
address of the name server you told it to use like this: nslookup
assumes that if the name server you want to use can't tell you its own
name, it might not be a good name server for your purpose.  in support
of this, i always make sure my nameservers, both recursive and
non-recursive, can always tell you their own name.

the output from dig is a little verbose at times, but host always
struck me as a tool that suffered from being under-verbose just about
all the time.

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