Article Written By: musarratsh
Nslookup is an administrative command line tool which is used for testing DNS servers as well as troubleshooting. It is also installed alongside the protocol of TCP/IP through a control panel. For any one to be able to know how to use Nslookup you are supposed to keep in mind several things. One of these is that the protocol of TCP/IP requires to be installed while running as Nslookup.exe on the system. Also important to note is that single DNS servers require to, at least, be defined in the Service Searching Order field of the DNS tab in the Properties page of Microsoft TCP/IP. Another thing to keep in mind is that Nslookup always devolves the name derived from the latest context. And this is as a result of name queries failing to be fully qualified results in the query being attached to the present context. An example of this will be the present DNS settings which are att.com when they are performing queries on microsoft website with the initial query going out as microsoft att and this is because it is unqualified. In some cases this can be an inconsistent behavior in regard to other vendor Nslookup versions. Nslookup.exe is run in both interactive as well as non-interactive modes with the non-interactive mode being the best as it only requires one data piece to be returned. Nslookup.exe may be started in the interactive mode and this is by simply typing "Nslookup" on the command prompt. You can also type "?" or "help" on the command prompt so as to generate lists of obtainable commands. In order to interrupt interactive commands you should press CTRL+C. you can also type "Exit" on the command prompt so that an interactive mode can be exited followed by a return to the command prompt. There are also several other options that can be set in Nslookup.exe and this is by running at the prompt's set command. These options can be obtained by typing "set all" on the command prompt. Different types of data can also be looked up and this is within the name space of the domain and this through using the set query type or set type command of the command prompt. An authoritative answer will be the result when you make the initial query for remoter names and the non authoritative results will be as a result of subsequent queries. Initial querying of the remote host also results in the respective DNS server contacting the authoritative DNS server of that domain. You are also capable of querying directly from different name servers and here server commands of lserver are supposed to be switched to this name server. Lserver commands are used for specifically getting the server address by making use of the local servers. Finding out the exact IP address that is resolved from domain name has been made easy by using Nslookup command. Reverse DNS lookup command helps in checking whether the DNS servers set in Microsoft Windows are working properly. If in any case they are not working properly, a webpage can not be displayed on your browser due to the domain names not being translated into IP addresses.
This Article Has Been Published on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 and Read 423 Times