BIND 9.3.0rc4 is now available.

[Thomas Schulz]

In article <chgm4d$1l44$1 at sf1.isc.org>,
Barry Margolin  <barmar at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>In article <chfgcf$26g5$1 at sf1.isc.org>, Tom Diehl <tdiehl at rogueind.com> 
>wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 5 Sep 2004, Paul Vixie wrote:
>> 
>> > Barry Margolin <barmar at alum.mit.edu> writes:
>> > 
>> > > > ...  use dig instead.  but we have to keep shipping [nslookup].
>> > > 
>> > > There are undoubtedly many scripts out there that use it, too.  It
>> > > wouldn't be nice to break all of them just because there are better tools
>> > > available (e.g. awk hasn't been deprecated just because things like Perl
>> > > and Python make it redundant).
>> > 
>> > nslookup isn't redundant.  it's Evil.
>> 
>> Is there a document somewhere that gives specifics of why nslookup is evil?
>> I have been told this many times by various people but I have never actually
>> seen an explaination of the issues. FWIW I use dig and I am not sure I even
>> remember how to use nslookup anymore but I am courious.
>
>I don't know an official document, but here are some of the obvious 
>problems.
>
>nslookup gives misleading error messages, often conflating different 
>errors into the same message.  For instance, it will tell you that a 
>name doesn't exist when it really means that the name doesn't have 
>records of the requested type.
>
>It has this really annoying requirement that the server named on the 
>command line (or the default server, if none was requested explicitly) 
>be able to reverse-resolve its own address.  This is problematic when 
>you're querying a non-recursive server that doesn't happen to host the 
>reverse domain containing its address.
>
>It doesn't distinguish the sections that records appear in.
>
>Some of these problems can be worked around by enabling its debugging 
>mode, so that it shows the decoded queries and responses.  But these are 
>much more verbose than dig, providing little extra information (it's 
>actually the same as using dig's +debug option).

I think that some of these problems no longer exist in the nslookup that
ships with Bind 9.  I believe that the default server does not have to
reverse-resolve.  One place where nslookup is good is when you need to
find the addresses of a bunch of machines.  You can just type 'nslookup'
and let it prompt you and then start feeding it machine names.  If someone
would have added this interactive user interface to dig or host, it would
have been easier to get rid of nslookup.
>
>-- 
>Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
>Arlington, MA
>*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***
>
-- 
Tom Schulz
schulz at adi.com