The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
On Sat, 2011-02-12 at 12:00 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
man dig
poc
On 02/12/2011 06:00 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
Try dig.
Regards, Patrick
On Sat, 2011-02-12 at 12:14 -0500, Tom Horsley wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 18:06:02 +0100 Patrick Lists wrote:
Try dig.
Yea, like try to get useful information from the unbelievably cryptic program that is dig :-).
I use it all the time, though mainly for simple things, e.g.:
dig foo.com dig -x 123.123.12.12 dig @my.favourite.dns.server foo.com dig foo.com mx dig foo.com soa
etc.
poc
On Sat, 2011-02-12 at 12:00 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
---- use dig - for a long time, there used to be a message appended to the output of nslookup on Fedora/Red Hat systems something to the effect that it was deprecated. I don't see that now but still, it has always had a marginal implementation on Linux.
Craig
Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
While I appreciate people taking time to provide pointers to other tools, that really wasn't the question... I don't want to retrain a bunch of people in a mixed AIX/Linux environment, nor give them the impression that Linux tools are inferior (although in this case they are).
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
These folks use "ls" and "hinfo" for many things, their internal nameservers provide it, I suspect their scripts expect it to work, and see no reason for the Linux version to be a capon. Violates Plauger's Law of Least Astonishment.
Thanks all.
On 02/12/2011 04:19 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
While I appreciate people taking time to provide pointers to other tools, that really wasn't the question... I don't want to retrain a bunch of people in a mixed AIX/Linux environment, nor give them the impression that Linux tools are inferior (although in this case they are).
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
These folks use "ls" and "hinfo" for many things, their internal nameservers provide it, I suspect their scripts expect it to work, and see no reason for the Linux version to be a capon. Violates Plauger's Law of Least Astonishment.
Thanks all.
nslookup came from isc.org I believe ..
http://ftp.isc.org/www/bind/arm95/Bv9ARM.ch03.html
Look down for nslookup ...
I may have missed it - what functionality are you looking for that is not working ?
On 12 February 2011 21:19, Bill Davidsen davidsen@tmr.com wrote:
While I appreciate people taking time to provide pointers to other tools, that really wasn't the question... I don't want to retrain a bunch of people in a mixed AIX/Linux environment, nor give them the impression that Linux tools are inferior (although in this case they are).
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
These folks use "ls" and "hinfo" for many things, their internal nameservers provide it, I suspect their scripts expect it to work, and see no reason for the Linux version to be a capon. Violates Plauger's Law of Least Astonishment.
There seems to be a little confusion in both the understanding of the original question, the responses to it, plus perhaps some clarity on the way forward is required.
"nslookup" was, and is, produced by ISC who also produce BIND (named). It has now been deprecated for some time and further development by ISC has ceased - "dig" and "hosts" are the tools to use going forwards. Most (all?) current Linux and BSD distributions have already reflected this, other OS's such as MS Windows and, apparently, AIX have yet to do so. There is also the possibility that AIX, like Microsoft Windows, has a customised/extended (and therefore proprietary) implementation of the ISC version of "nslookup".
Bill, I think you need to take a step back from the immediate problem and think about the long term. It's never fun when a tool we use is EoL'd, but unless you plan on sticking with AIX and trust that it will continue to support their version of "nslookup", you may have some tough decisions to make. If you can't find a suitable version of "nslookup" for Linux, then you may need to look at going the other way; getting "dig" and "hosts" onto your AIX boxes and starting to migrate your scripts over to the new tools.
Unfortunately, "dig" has a syntax that can be considerably more convoluted than the equivalent in "nslookup". It is however worth the effort to learn the new way as the output from "dig" is generally much better suited to troubleshooting problems with DNS than "nslookup" ever was.
Regards,
On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 21:59:45 +0000 Andy Blanchard wrote:
Unfortunately, "dig" has a syntax that can be considerably more convoluted than the equivalent in "nslookup".
Yea, I find it hysterical that the reason recommended for switching to dig is because nslookup has an arcane user interface :-).
Tom Horsley wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 21:59:45 +0000 Andy Blanchard wrote:
Unfortunately, "dig" has a syntax that can be considerably more convoluted than the equivalent in "nslookup".
Yea, I find it hysterical that the reason recommended for switching to dig is because nslookup has an arcane user interface :-).
Smells to me like reins and crops versus brakes and accelerators; horses were nice but they just couldn't outdo their replacements: the autos.
I don't really see the difficulty in somethings as simple as
dig @"nameserver I want to use" "what I'm looking up" "record type"
Sorry to all :/ Just couldn't get my keyboard to shut on this one... :m)
Tom Horsley wrote:
On Sat, 12 Feb 2011 21:59:45 +0000 Andy Blanchard wrote:
Unfortunately, "dig" has a syntax that can be considerably more convoluted than the equivalent in "nslookup".
Yea, I find it hysterical that the reason recommended for switching to dig is because nslookup has an arcane user interface :-).
Smells to me like reins and crops versus brakes and accelerators; horses were nice but they just couldn't outdo their replacements: the autos.
I don't really see the difficulty in somethings as simple as
dig @"nameserver I want to use" "what I'm looking up" "record type"
Sorry to all :/ Just couldn't get my keyboard to shut on this one... :m)
Andy Blanchard wrote:
Bill, I think you need to take a step back from the immediate problem and think about the long term. It's never fun when a tool we use is EoL'd, but unless you plan on sticking with AIX and trust that it will continue to support their version of "nslookup", you may have some tough decisions to make. If you can't find a suitable version of "nslookup" for Linux, then you may need to look at going the other way; getting "dig" and "hosts" onto your AIX boxes and starting to migrate your scripts over to the new tools.
This is Linux (from IBM) going into AIX, in an IBM shop. The chances of IBM dropping AIX are remote (new major release out last year), and there are apps in AIX which are not in Linux. So I think the chances are that I will die before AIX usage does.
Unfortunately, "dig" has a syntax that can be considerably more convoluted than the equivalent in "nslookup". It is however worth the effort to learn the new way as the output from "dig" is generally much better suited to troubleshooting problems with DNS than "nslookup" ever was.
The problem I'm troubleshooting is that there is no budget for training people, no budget for rewriting scripts, and a loud majority which feels that Linux is a toy OS because it's not "real UNIX" based. That's management as well as workers.
I would really not like to fight this battle, I was hoping someone would answer the question I asked instead of assuming that I meant "what can I use instead of nslookup" which is not the problem. The issues are money, time, and office politics, and I ran "yum clean obstructionists" but it didn't work.
On 13 February 2011 18:03, Bill Davidsen davidsen@tmr.com wrote:
This is Linux (from IBM) going into AIX, in an IBM shop. The chances of IBM dropping AIX are remote (new major release out last year), and there are apps in AIX which are not in Linux. So I think the chances are that I will die before AIX usage does.
If this is IBM supported Linux and you are a sizeable AIX shop you might try asking them for a port of the AIX version of NS Lookup or, in the unlikely event they will let you have it, the code to roll your own. Failing that, good luck with finding a suitable version of NSlookup code to achieve the same ends - sounds like that is your only way forwards...
The problem I'm troubleshooting is that there is no budget for training people, no budget for rewriting scripts, and a loud majority which feels that Linux is a toy OS because it's not "real UNIX" based. That's management as well as workers.
That sounds oh so familiar recently. You want to try convincing big business & government organisations that, yes, they really ought to be thinking about IPv6 *now*, and not when they need to connect to someone who could only get IPv6 addresses... Too many ostriches in ICT at the moment....
I ran "yum clean obstructionists" but it didn't work.
Oh, if only... :)
Regards,
On Sun, 2011-02-13 at 13:03 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
I would really not like to fight this battle, I was hoping someone would answer the question I asked instead of assuming that I meant "what can I use instead of nslookup" which is not the problem. The issues are money, time, and office politics, and I ran "yum clean obstructionists" but it didn't work.
---- I think the question you asked was indeed answered... the nslookup utility shipped with Fedora is part of the Bind utilities from ISC and is deprecated and suggestions were to use dig.
The truth is that you just didn't like the answer so you chose to ignore it.
Craig
On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Craig White craigwhite@azapple.com wrote:
On Sun, 2011-02-13 at 13:03 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
I would really not like to fight this battle, I was hoping someone would answer the question I asked instead of assuming that I meant "what can I use instead of nslookup" which is not the problem. The issues are money, time, and office politics, and I ran "yum clean obstructionists" but it didn't work.
I think the question you asked was indeed answered... the nslookup utility shipped with Fedora is part of the Bind utilities from ISC and is deprecated and suggestions were to use dig.
The truth is that you just didn't like the answer so you chose to ignore it.
+1
Furthermore, since your AIX admins consider Linux a toy, they shouldn't have any problem playing with dig. :)
Craig White wrote:
On Sun, 2011-02-13 at 13:03 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
I would really not like to fight this battle, I was hoping someone would answer the question I asked instead of assuming that I meant "what can I use instead of nslookup" which is not the problem. The issues are money, time, and office politics, and I ran "yum clean obstructionists" but it didn't work.
I think the question you asked was indeed answered... the nslookup utility shipped with Fedora is part of the Bind utilities from ISC and is deprecated and suggestions were to use dig.
The truth is that you just didn't like the answer so you chose to ignore it.
Asking where to find source for A and getting pointers to B is like asking where to get Italian food and being pointed to a Mexican restaurant. I am trying to avoid training time, because there's no budget and people who think AIX is the one true OS *will* ask for a shop order for training, just to be obnoxious.
AIX users are no different than Windows or Solaris users, some confuse preference with religion. And the claim that changing scripts to use dig will take a bit of time appear justified, one programmer said dig was the "most obscurest crap" since he learned APL.
I may be able to get the AIX source, possibilities abound.
Once upon a time, Bill Davidsen davidsen@tmr.com said:
Asking where to find source for A and getting pointers to B is like asking where to get Italian food and being pointed to a Mexican restaurant.
In this case, it is more like asking for the blacksmith for your horse in downtown $BIGCITY and being pointed to the car dealer.
AIX users are no different than Windows or Solaris users, some confuse preference with religion. And the claim that changing scripts to use dig will take a bit of time appear justified, one programmer said dig was the "most obscurest crap" since he learned APL.
It is different from nslookup, but it is hardly obscure (and I've written APL as well). Don't like all the debugging info (on by default since both nslookup and dig are intended as debugging tools)? Turn it off with +short. Frankly, if you can't read dig output, you probably shouldn't be touching DNS servers.
I may be able to get the AIX source, possibilities abound.
You keep actiing like Fedora (or Linux in general) is intentionally breaking the ancient program, but the truth is that AIX is running an ancient resolver library. The rest of the world moved on a long time ago; I recently turned off my last Tru64 Unix server, but I think DEC switched to the newer resolver and nslookup/dig in Tru64 5.1, and that was released in 2000 IIRC.
Has AIX never deprecated a command before?
You should be able find the ancient nslookup source at isc.org (I think you'll have to go all the way back to the BIND 4 source). I don't think it will work with a modern resolver library though, and it won't work with EDNS, DNSSEC, various RR types, and IIRC DNS over TCP in some cases. nslookup wasn't deprecated just to change things; it is terminally broken code.
It'd probably be easier to write a wrapper for dig that looks like nslookup.
Chris Adams wrote:
You keep actiing like Fedora (or Linux in general) is intentionally breaking the ancient program, but the truth is that AIX is running an ancient resolver library. The rest of the world moved on a long time ago; I recently turned off my last Tru64 Unix server, but I think DEC switched to the newer resolver and nslookup/dig in Tru64 5.1, and that was released in 2000 IIRC.
I'm acting like I asked a perfectly clear question about where to find source and got a bunch of answers from people who don't understand the reason for the question and assume it's something it's not. There are good reasons to want to keep nslookup, all financial or political. Retraining costs money, rewriting scripts costs money, at least where I live there a recession on, and installing a working version is important to the people with the money.
Has AIX never deprecated a command before?
I have no idea, not to hear the AIX fanboys tell it.
On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 16:12 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Chris Adams wrote:
You keep actiing like Fedora (or Linux in general) is intentionally breaking the ancient program, but the truth is that AIX is running an ancient resolver library. The rest of the world moved on a long time ago; I recently turned off my last Tru64 Unix server, but I think DEC switched to the newer resolver and nslookup/dig in Tru64 5.1, and that was released in 2000 IIRC.
I'm acting like I asked a perfectly clear question about where to find source and got a bunch of answers from people who don't understand the reason for the question and assume it's something it's not. There are good reasons to want to keep nslookup, all financial or political. Retraining costs money, rewriting scripts costs money, at least where I live there a recession on, and installing a working version is important to the people with the money.
Has AIX never deprecated a command before?
I have no idea, not to hear the AIX fanboys tell it.
-- Bill Davidsen davidsen@tmr.com "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked." - from Slashdot
Bill,
Nslookup is part of the bind-utils package, I don't know if IBM has ported this guy to the AIX toolbox but you could have a look there.
On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 16:12 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Chris Adams wrote:
You keep actiing like Fedora (or Linux in general) is intentionally breaking the ancient program, but the truth is that AIX is running an ancient resolver library. The rest of the world moved on a long time ago; I recently turned off my last Tru64 Unix server, but I think DEC switched to the newer resolver and nslookup/dig in Tru64 5.1, and that was released in 2000 IIRC.
I'm acting like I asked a perfectly clear question about where to find source and got a bunch of answers from people who don't understand the reason for the question and assume it's something it's not.
Bill, the entirety of your original question was as follows:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
Since you didn't at that time supply any of the "political" reasons behind the question, some of us assumed you simply didn't know about dig, which as has been said repeatedly, is the standard DNS lookup program on Linux and other Unix-like systems. If you had explained that you needed exactly nslookup *and not a substitute* perhaps some misunderstanding could have been avoided.
poc
I may be able to get the AIX source, possibilities abound.
Have I got *NEWS* for you!!!!
I have a friend up in Korea with access to AIX machines. Their AIX server is running 6.11
It has exactly the same nslookup as provided on the various Linux vendors I mentioned.
The feature of "ls" is not implemented.
Ed Greshko wrote:
I may be able to get the AIX source, possibilities abound.
Have I got *NEWS* for you!!!!
I have a friend up in Korea with access to AIX machines. Their AIX server is running 6.11
It has exactly the same nslookup as provided on the various Linux vendors I mentioned.
The feature of "ls" is not implemented.
After some checking, it appears that AIX has dropped support for nslookup between AIX 5 and 6, the management solution was to "look harder" for the fully functional source. :-(
I'm wondering how long it would take to write nslookup in perl. No, I'm not joking.
On 02/27/2011 07:31 AM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
After some checking, it appears that AIX has dropped support for nslookup between AIX 5 and 6, the management solution was to "look harder" for the fully functional source. :-(
You're management *still* has it wrong. AIX and every Linux distro hasn't "dropped" anything. They all get their "bind" software from the same upstream source. That upstream source has depreciated nslookup in favor of dig.
I'm wondering how long it would take to write nslookup in perl. No, I'm not joking.
That sounds like a good plan. Write a tool in another language that performs the same function of an existing tool...and then support that tool into the future...all to avoid learning how to use the existing tool.
Your time may be marginally spent better writing a wrapper around dig to make it appear as if it is nslookup.
Ed Greshko wrote:
On 02/27/2011 07:31 AM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
After some checking, it appears that AIX has dropped support for nslookup between AIX 5 and 6, the management solution was to "look harder" for the fully functional source. :-(
You're management *still* has it wrong. AIX and every Linux distro hasn't "dropped" anything. They all get their "bind" software from the same upstream source. That upstream source has depreciated nslookup in favor of dig.
I'm wondering how long it would take to write nslookup in perl. No, I'm not joking.
That sounds like a good plan. Write a tool in another language that performs the same function of an existing tool...and then support that tool into the future...all to avoid learning how to use the existing tool.
Again, outside political concerns, training time and script rewrites are likely to be more expensive than writing the tool.
Your time may be marginally spent better writing a wrapper around dig to make it appear as if it is nslookup.
My time is best spent implementing what people will pay for. ;-)
These people not only don't pay for good advice, they won't even take it for free in many cases.
On 02/27/2011 08:30 AM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
These people not only don't pay for good advice, they won't even take it for free in many cases.
Good luck to you. No matter what direction you take, the chances are sometime in the future the situation will become totally untenable. I've seen that happen when it was no longer possible to compile old code due to the library dependencies also becoming obsolete.
Ed Greshko wrote:
On 02/27/2011 08:30 AM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
These people not only don't pay for good advice, they won't even take it for free in many cases.
Good luck to you. No matter what direction you take, the chances are sometime in the future the situation will become totally untenable. I've seen that happen when it was no longer possible to compile old code due to the library dependencies also becoming obsolete.
That is at least likely to remain solved, perl isn't going to be a problem using the current library calls, and old binaries work just fine linked static. There's a program (statify IIRC) which converts dynamic linked programs to (large and ugly) static executable images.
Hopefully the economy will get better, and when they have to go to AIX 6.x they will either change away from nslookup or pay for one in perl. It actually isn't that awful a job, I suspect.
On 2/26/11 5:30 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Again, outside political concerns, training time and script rewrites are likely to be more expensive than writing the tool.
It is best that you tell them that nslookup is not maintained, has MAJOR security concerns and sell them on dig. If they don't buy, walk. I'm serious, you will continue to encounter more and more problems with these folks. They will have to bring in a consultant who WILL tell them the facts and put it in their face. That is sad, but that is the way. Unless you are a stakeholder, they will continue to ignore you.
Your time may be marginally spent better writing a wrapper around dig to make it appear as if it is nslookup.
My time is best spent implementing what people will pay for. ;-)
These people not only don't pay for good advice, they won't even take it for free in many cases.
Another reason to book, the faster the better. We don't even install nslookup anymore and we are a MAJOR customer of Oracle and RedHat (something in the number of thousands of systems installed.) I talk to the manager of DNS services to see if their system has it installed, but I'm just about certain that they are dig only.
James McKenzie
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 5:31 PM, Bill Davidsen davidsen@tmr.com wrote:
Ed Greshko wrote:
I may be able to get the AIX source, possibilities abound.
Have I got *NEWS* for you!!!!
I have a friend up in Korea with access to AIX machines. Their AIX server is running 6.11
It has exactly the same nslookup as provided on the various Linux vendors I mentioned.
The feature of "ls" is not implemented.
After some checking, it appears that AIX has dropped support for nslookup between AIX 5 and 6, the management solution was to "look harder" for the fully functional source. :-(
I'm wondering how long it would take to write nslookup in perl. No, I'm not joking.
It was in
BSD/OS home.texoma.net 4.0.1 BSDI BSD/OS 4.0.1 Kernel #5: Thu Dec 30 20:38:22 CST 1999 root@mail.texoma.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/LOCAL i386
so check online for the source or with Paul Vixie or someone else at ISC.ORG.
regards/vaden@texoma.net
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Larry Vaden vaden@texoma.net wrote:
I'm wondering how long it would take to write nslookup in perl. No, I'm not joking.
It was in
BSD/OS home.texoma.net 4.0.1 BSDI BSD/OS 4.0.1 Kernel #5: Thu Dec 30 20:38:22 CST 1999 root@mail.texoma.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/LOCAL i386
so check online for the source or with Paul Vixie or someone else at ISC.ORG.
Even easier, it was in Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche). Verified that it had been deprecated by FC3 (RHEL4). Sorry for the spotty history, we don't have one or more of everything that has ever run here in rural north Texas :)
regards/vaden@texoma.net
On 02/26/2011 07:33 PM, Larry Vaden wrote:
On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 6:18 PM, Larry Vaden vaden@texoma.net wrote:
I'm wondering how long it would take to write nslookup in perl. No, I'm not joking.
It was in
BSD/OS home.texoma.net 4.0.1 BSDI BSD/OS 4.0.1 Kernel #5: Thu Dec 30 20:38:22 CST 1999 root@mail.texoma.net:/usr/src/sys/compile/LOCAL i386
so check online for the source or with Paul Vixie or someone else at ISC.ORG.
Even easier, it was in Red Hat Linux release 8.0 (Psyche). Verified that it had been deprecated by FC3 (RHEL4). Sorry for the spotty history, we don't have one or more of everything that has ever run here in rural north Texas :)
regards/vaden@texoma.net
One solution (that sucks) is to write a wrapper that provides the same functionality as nslookup, and just call dig under the covers.
On Feb 13, 2011, at 1:03 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
and a loud majority which feels that Linux is a toy OS because it's not "real UNIX" based. That's management as well as workers.
Well, you could always ask them why IBM chose Linux for their Watson supercomputer system.....
On Sat, 2011-02-12 at 16:19 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
While I appreciate people taking time to provide pointers to other tools, that really wasn't the question... I don't want to retrain a bunch of people in a mixed AIX/Linux environment, nor give them the impression that Linux tools are inferior (although in this case they are).
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
These folks use "ls" and "hinfo" for many things, their internal nameservers provide it, I suspect their scripts expect it to work, and see no reason for the Linux version to be a capon. Violates Plauger's Law of Least Astonishment.
---- hey, it's open source so feel free to dig in and fix the commands that you feel are broken.
Craig
Once upon a time, Bill Davidsen davidsen@tmr.com said:
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
AFAIK nslookup has always come from BIND (in all the Unix-like OSes, not just Linux), and upstream BIND deprecated nslookup in favor of dig many years ago. IIRC nslookup mucked around in the resolver library's internals (sometimes actually producing wrong results I believe), and when those internals changed, nobody wanted to update nslookup.
dig can do everything nslookup could do; you mentioned:
- ls - IIRC that did a zone transfer, so is the same as "dig <zone> axfr" - hinfo - that is the same as "dig <host> hinfo"
If you need to query a specific nameserver, you add "@<server>". If you don't want the full packet output, you can add "+short" to get just the answer. If you want to set some of these things as defaults, you can put them in $HOME/.digrc (it is read as if it were the start of the command line, so just put the options in there).
If your AIX systems are at all current, they should also have dig (if not, complain to IBM that their resolver is ancient, as it is also probably full of bugs); as nslookup has been deprecated by its authors (and AFAIK nobody has stepped up to develop a new and up-to-date version), you are probably going to be better off learning a new tool that is its designated replacement.
On 2/12/11 8:21 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Bill Davidsendavidsen@tmr.com said:
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
AFAIK nslookup has always come from BIND (in all the Unix-like OSes, not just Linux), and upstream BIND deprecated nslookup in favor of dig many years ago. IIRC nslookup mucked around in the resolver library's internals (sometimes actually producing wrong results I believe), and when those internals changed, nobody wanted to update nslookup.
Thank you for the confirmation that nslookup is deprecated. I'm surprised that Linux still carries nslookup. Possibly to work with those programs that need/desire it.
James McKenzie
On 02/13/2011 05:14 AM, James McKenzie wrote:
On 2/12/11 8:21 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, Bill Davidsendavidsen@tmr.com said:
I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a solution. Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it just for me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
AFAIK nslookup has always come from BIND (in all the Unix-like OSes, not just Linux), and upstream BIND deprecated nslookup in favor of dig many years ago. IIRC nslookup mucked around in the resolver library's internals (sometimes actually producing wrong results I believe), and when those internals changed, nobody wanted to update nslookup.
Thank you for the confirmation that nslookup is deprecated. I'm surprised that Linux still carries nslookup. Possibly to work with those programs that need/desire it.
James McKenzie
Just to confirm that nslookup comme from bind upstream:
$ rpm -qf `which nslookup` bind-utils-9.7.2-5.P3.fc14.x86_64
On Sat, 2011-02-12 at 12:00 -0500, Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
Semms to me that nslookup was made obsolete somew versions od Fedora ago. dig and hosts are its replacement.
On 02/12/2011 04:43 PM, Aaron Konstam wrote:
Semms to me that nslookup was made obsolete somew versions od Fedora ago. dig and hosts are its replacement.
I kinda thought that too - but its still part of bind 9.5 (not sure about bind 10) - the docs for it do say:
"Due to its arcane user interface and frequently inconsistent behavior, we do not recommend the use of nslookup. Use dig instead."
Which is not quite saying obsoleted ... more like please avoid (use dig and host)
g
On 02/13/2011 01:00 AM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
The nslookup shipped with Fedora is a toy, with most of the important parts returning "not implemented" status. Can someone point me to a source for the real program, such as I used on other systems like AIX? The lack of functionality is becoming a real time-waster!
If you think that nslookup shipped with Fedora is a "toy" then you'll be delighted to know that it is also a "toy" within RHELv4, RHELv5, SUSE, Ubuntu, etc. as they all use the same upstream source.
I would like to know what version of AIX you are using. I ask this since when I look at the man pages for AIX I see that in 5.3 the "ls" function is defined. However, in 6.1 it isn't.
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/pseries/v5r3/index.jsp
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/aix/v6r1/index.jsp
But, anyway.....
A later posting from you seems to suggest that you are hamstrung by people unable/unwilling to move forward. I will tell you that I had a "similar" situation a few years ago. What I ended up doing was writing a "wrapper" around the new command to mimic the old command. This way, the "lazy" people didn't have to learn anything new.
I think it was 6+ months after that they bemoaned the fact that the old command wasn't able to do something they thought it should. So, I pointed them to the new command and they finally "switched", having never known they were using the new one all along.
-
Aaron Konstam -
Andy Blanchard -
Athmane Madjoudj -
Bill Davidsen -
Chris Adams -
Craig White -
Ed Greshko -
Genes MailLists -
James McKenzie -
James McKenzie -
Jerry Feldman -
Jorge Fábregas -
Lamar Owen -
Larry Vaden -
Mike Wright -
Patrick Lists -
Patrick O'Callaghan -
Terry Polzin -
Tom H -
Tom Horsley