Domain Name System (DNS) is a central part of the internet, providing a way to match names (a website you’re seeking) to numbers (the address for the website). It’s an integral part of the modern web. You may need to query the DNS server on a Linux machine for many reasons, like debugging a network problem or trying to trace the route of an email. Here’s how to query DNS server on Linux.
Using Dig
Dig (domain information groper) is a flexible tool for interrogating DNS name servers. It performs DNS lookups and displays the answers that are returned from the name server(s) that were queried. Here is an example of how to use it.
dig is usually used with its command-line arguments. The basic syntax for dig is:
dig @nameserver domain type
Here, ‘nameserver’ is the DNS server address you want to query, ‘domain’ is the domain name you are querying about, and ‘type’ refers to the type of query (such as A for Address Records, MX for Mail Exchange Records etc).
For example, to query Google’s DNS servers for the IP address of example.com, you would use:
dig @8.8.8.8 example.com A
Using Nslookup
Nslookup is a network administration tool for querying the Domain Name System (DNS) to obtain domain name or IP address mapping or for any other specific DNS record.
Here’s how you can use nslookup to query the DNS server:
nslookup domain nameserver
As above, ‘domain’ is the domain name you are querying about, and ‘nameserver’ is the DNS server address you want to query. So for example, to query Google’s DNS servers for the IP address of example.com, you would use:
nslookup example.com 8.8.8.8
In conclusion, querying a DNS server on Linux is an essential skill for network troubleshooting. Whether you prefer to use dig or nslookup, both tools provide an easy way to find out DNS information about a domain. We hope this guide has been helpful for you.
