[Techtalk] Resolving a doman name

Matthew Miller mattdm at mattdm.org
Thu Jan 20 10:20:45 EST 2005


On Tue, Jan 18, 2005 at 06:56:57PM -0800, Cynthia Kiser wrote:
> nslookup is depricated, but I still find the output more readable than
> dig.

I thought exactly the same thing, and I've heard this comment from, like,
dozens of my friends. And then I read the little message further:

  Note:  nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
  Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead.  Run nslookup with
                               ^^^^

And I tried out the 'host' thing, and then I felt kinda silly, because for
the trivial case, it's totally the best thing:

  $ host www.caltech.edu
  www.caltech.edu has address 131.215.220.4

After a bit of research, I discovered that nslookup isn't deprecated out of
just meanness, but because it's got some serious flaws in the way it works.
Well, quirks, more like -- it does more work trying to resolve the name of
the server you're querying that really necessary, and acts oddly with
recursive queries.

I dunno what it is about that warning message, but I've _constantly_ seen
perfectly sensible people (um, y'know, like *me*) stop at the 'dig' part and
never check out 'host', which is what they usually actually want.


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>


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