The articles here will show you how you can use various network tools to check your DNS. With these tools, you can find which name servers are responsible for your domain name, with which IP address a domain name is associated with, check if a zone exist on a name server and much more. Every example in this category contains a sample input and output.
DIG (domain information groper) is a network administration tool available mostly in *NIX-based operating systems. It is useful for network troubleshooting and for educational purposes. When a specific name server is not specified in the command invocation, it will use the operating systems default resolver, usually configured via the resolv.conf file. Without any arguments it queries the DNS root zone.
NSLOOKUP is a network administration tool that is available on almost every operating system. NSLOOKUP does not use the operating system's local Domain Name System resolver library to perform its queries, and thus may behave differently from DIG.
Ping is a very universal command between all the operating systems. You can use it to test if you can reach your target and how much time it will take to do it. Ping sends Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets to the destination. Then it waits for the echo reply. It can show statistics for this request, errors and packet loss.
Traceroute is a convenient tool that you can use under different operation systems – Windows (Tracert), MacOS, Linux (traceroute) and even on mobile (Android and iOS).
You can use Traceroute, and see the full route that the packets take to their destination (domain or IP address). Apart from that, you will see the hostnames and IPs of the routers on the way and the latency, the time it takes for each device to receive and resend the data.
The Host command is a software with a command-line interface that serves to test DNS. Internet Systems Consortium created it, and it is distributed as a permissive free software with an ISC license. The Host command is a utility tool for network diagnostic that you can use to probe different DNS records.
MTR (Matt’s traceroute) is a program with a command-line interface that serves for network diagnostic and troubleshooting. The original code was created by Matt Kimball in 1997.
The advantage of this software is that it combines the functionality of the Ping command and the Traceroute. Just like a typical traceroute query, a query from the MTR command will show the route from a computer to a specified host.