DNS on Windows 2000, Second Edition

Troubleshooting nslookup Problems

The last thing you want is to have problems with your troubleshooting tool. Unfortunately, some types of failures render the troubleshooting tool mostly useless. Other types of nslookup failures are, at best, confusing because they don’t give you any direct information to work with. While there may be a few problems with nslookup itself, most of the problems you encounter will be with name server configuration and operation. We’ll cover a few odd problems here.

Looking Up the Right Data

This isn’t really a problem, per se, but it can be awfully confusing. If you use nslookup to look up a type of data for a domain name and the domain name exists but no data of the type you’re looking for exists, you’ll get an error like this:

C:\> nslookup 
Default Server:  terminator.movie.edu 
Address:  192.249.249.3 

> movie.edu. 

*** No address (A) records available for movie.edu.

So what types of records do exist? You can use set type=any to find out:

> set type=any 
> movie.edu. Server: terminator.movie.edu Address: 192.249.249.3 movie.edu nameserver = terminator.movie.edu movie.edu nameserver = wormhole.movie.edu movie.edu primary name server = terminator.movie.edu responsible mail addr = administrator.movie.edu serial = 6 refresh = 3600 (1 hour) retry = 600 (10 mins) expire = 86400 (1 day) default TTL = 3600 (1 hour) movie.edu MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = wormhole.movie.edu terminator.movie.edu internet address = 192.249.249.3 wormhole.movie.edu internet ...