Windows 2000 Administration in a Nutshell

Name

nslookup

Synopsis

Diagnostic utility for displaying information stored in DNS servers.

Modes

nslookup has two modes of operation:

Interactive

In this mode, an nslookup shell is opened so that any sequence of nslookup commands can be run one at a time. Enter interactive mode by typing:

nslookup

Noninteractive

In this mode, only a single nslookup command is run, after which you return to the command prompt. The syntax is:

nslookup -command host DNSserver

-command

One of the nslookup commands listed later in this article. The hyphen is part of the syntax.

host

The IP address or hostname of the host whose DNS information you want to obtain from the DNS server. If you use a hyphen, the prompt changes to nslookup interactive mode.

DNSserver

The IP address or hostname of the DNS server you want to query. (If omitted, the default DNS server for the local machine is used.)

Commands

? or help

Briefly describes these commands.

exit

Quits the interactive mode of nslookup.

finger [ username ]

Fingers the current computer for a list of currently logged-on users. If you specify username, then the information for that user is obtained.

ls [ option ] dnsdomain [[> | >>] filename ]

Lists (or redirects to a file) different subsets of resource records for the specified DNS domain depending on the option selected, specifically:

-t querytype

Lists all records of the specified type (see Table 7.19)

-a

Lists aliases of hosts in the DNS domain (same result as using -t CNAME)

-d

Lists all records for the DNS ...