Quoting Steve Litt (sl...@troubleshooters.com): > What's your opinion of nslookup as an alternative to dig? Not sure, but > I think you need to install bind to get dig, and not everyone wants to > install bind.
1. No, dig isn't bundled with BIND9 _in Linux distros_ (or in other *ixes), all of which build it standalone from parts of the ISC BIND9 sources. 2. It's complicated. For quite a long time, nslookup was officially deprecated because it gave provably wrong results in some use cases, and because it relied on a chunk of very buggy spaghetti code carried forward from the old BIND4 codebase. This was covered in, among other places a Paul Vixie interview (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Network_Other/dig-nslookup.html). DJB had a page about this (circa end of the 1990s) that I kept referring people to: https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/nslookup.html Then, in 2017, ISC suddenly removed the notations declaring that nslookup was deprecated and that people should be learning to use dig & host. Specifically, this was in the release notes for BIND 9.9.0a3: 1700. [func] nslookup is no longer to be treated as deprecated. Remove "deprecated" warning message. Add man page. I never got the full story about what exactly happened. Perhaps someone at ISC found the time and interest to rewrite nslookup's internals to fix its lingering problems. In any event, having moved on from nslookup to dig about two decades ago, I seriously no longer care. Even back then when it was a pain in the tochis to learn a repalcement networking tool, I could see that 'dig' was a generally better, more flexible, more functional tool with more script-parseable output, so I really don't care if nslookup has been improved from unacceptable to tolerable. To my knowledge, the main reason nslookup persists is that it, and not dig/host, is bundled by default with MS-Windows. All other commonly available OSes (and most particularly any *ix including OSX) long ago replaced it with 'dig'. For any MS-Windows-using friends, this page explains step-by-step how to retrofit .EXE-binary copies of dig / host / whois: https://www.mowasay.com/2017/10/r-i-p-nslookup-start-using-dig-or-host/ _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng