DNS on Windows Server 2003, 3rd Edition

Using dig

That’s one way to< deal with what’s arguably a shortcoming in nslookup. Another is just to chuck nslookup and use dig, the Domain Information Groper (a reverse-engineered acronym if we’ve ever heard one). dig is a powerful DNS query tool that comes with BIND. Unfortunately, it isn’t shipped with Windows Server 2003, but you can get a version of dig that runs on Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 from ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind/contrib/ntbind-8.4.1/BIND8.4.1Tools.zip. You may also need to download the other DLLs available at ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind/contrib/ntbind-8.4.1. Follow the installation instructions in the readme1sttools.txt file and note the Known Problems section of that file. It tells you, for example, that on Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, dig can’t read the resolver configuration from the Registry, so it has no idea what name servers to query by default. You’ll need to create the file %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\resolv.conf that contains at least one line specifying a name server to query:

nameserver 4.2.2.2

Now, all this might seem like a lot of trouble when nslookup is already installed. But for our DNS troubleshooting purposes, we left nslookup in the dust years ago. We hope you’ll come to appreciate dig as much as we do.

With dig, you specify all aspects of the query you’d like to send on the command line; there’s no interactive mode. You specify the domain name you want to look up as an argument, and the type of query you ...