Chapter 12. nslookup and dig

"Don't stand chattering to yourself like that," Humpty Dumpty said, looking at her for the first time, "but tell me your name and your business."

"My name is Alice, but—

"It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"

"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.

"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh . . . .

To be proficient at troubleshooting name server problems, you'll need a special tool to make DNS queries, one that gives you complete control. We'll cover nslookup in this chapter because it's distributed with Windows Server 2003 and with many other operating systems. We'll also cover another query tool, dig, that isn't part of Windows. It provides similar functionality and doesn't suffer from nslookup's deficiencies.