using in.named and named.boot on BIND V8

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:00 PM -0400 5/25/01, Joseph S D Yao wrote:

>  The 'nslookup' program is a great little program for translating names
>  to IP addresses and back ONCE DNS IS WORKING PROPERLY.

	I cannot disagree more strongly with this statement.  The 
"nslookup" program does not use the standard resolver routines, and 
violates virtually every principle I know of with regards to using 
the resolver and the DNS protocol the same way that "regular" 
programs do.

	This is what makes it such an incredibly piss-poor tool for a 
human being to use to try to figure out what might be wrong with 
their nameserver.


	Now, for experienced domain administrators who are familiar with 
all the weakenesses of "nslookup", and understand the proper context 
in which the tool can be used, it's not too bad -- but "dig" is much 
better.

	However, it is precisely for the less experienced person that 
"nslookup" is the worst possible tool to use -- it *SEEMS* simple to 
use, and hides a lot of apparent complexity, but the reality of it is 
that this tool seriously screws up far too many things under the hood 
and is quite easily capable of gravely misrepresenting the results.

	I have to assume that it is for reasons like this that "nslookup" 
is completely gone from more recent versions of BIND.  Good riddance!

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

/*        efdtt.c  Author:  Charles M. Hannum <root at ihack.net>          */
/*       Represented as 1045 digit prime number by Phil Carmody         */
/*     Prime as DNS cname chain by Roy Arends and Walter Belgers        */
/*                                                                      */
/*     Usage is:  cat title-key scrambled.vob | efdtt >clear.vob        */
/*   where title-key = "153 2 8 105 225" or other similar 5-byte key    */

dig decss.friet.org|perl -ne'if(/^x/){s/[x.]//g;print pack(H124,$_)}'