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DNSTESTE
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ReadMe2nd
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1996-03-28
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Instructions
============
Read ReadMe1st for Terms & Conditions
Run by double-click on !DNSTester in a Filer window, and provided the Toolbox
modules are found and enough free memory is found, the DNS tester window will
open. This window has 3 sections: "Name servers configured", "Query" and
"Answers".
If all three of the name servers are registered as "None", then this probably
means you do not have a DNS resolver installed on your system which is
compatible with DNS tester. (You need a file in your internet files
directory called "resconf" containing the configuration information).
Otherwise, you should see a list of up to three numeric IP addresses listed
there which correspond with the nameserver lines in the "resconf" file.
These are the nameservers which the program will be making queries too
when you initiate a query. The "Lookup Name" button is described below.
The "Query" section of the window contains a long writable icon into which
you can type a hostname or an IP address, or a mail domain name, or a normal
domain name. You must then choose the type of lookup you want to do. There
are 4 choices, represented by the 4 radio buttons. The top two should be
pretty obvious. Mail Exchangers takes an e-mail domain and returns a list
of machines which handle mail for it. Name Servers takes a domain name and
returns a list of authoritative name servers for that domain. This is
useful since other nameservers (eg. the ones listed in the top portion of the
window) will cache answers that they've seen before so that they can respond
to you quickly without bothering to find the server that's really in charge
of that domain. Using this method, you can find out the names of these
authoritative servers.
Hopefully it is obvious that clicking Run Query starts a query, and clicking
Interrupt stops one that is in progress.
The 3 "Lookup name" buttons in the top section of the window are a shortcut
for doing the following: clicking "Address to Names", typing the IP address
into the writable icon, clicking Run Query.
The "Answers" section is used to display the Answers and any other status
message as a result of running a query. If the button beneath the display
field is not greyed out, then clicking on it will perform a lookup on the
value shown (either Address to Names or Name to Addresses as appropriate).
Since some queries can return multiple answer records, you click on the
menu icon to display a list of all the answers that were returned. (For
example, try doing a "Name to Addresses" lookup for "sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk"
and look at the menu at you should see 9 IP addresses [correct at time of
writing]).
The answers for the Name to Addresses and Address to Names lookups are
obvious. The Name Server results are a list of hostnames which are
authoritative name servers for the domain you entered. The Mail
Exchangers is a list of machines which forward mail for the given
mail domain (the bit after the @ in e-mail addresses). Note that
all the answers have a number after them in brackets eg. looking
up ecs.soton.ac.uk
bright.ecs.soton.ac.uk (5)
landlord.ecs.soton.ac.uk (10)
These numbers indicate the "preference" (and names will have been sorted
so that the highest priority is first, which is the lowest number).
That's it!
There's no cacheing in there, so all requests will go to the nameservers
unless the entries are found in your Hosts file.
Bug reports etc. to me via e-mail please.
--
Stewart Brodie
S.N.Brodie@ecs.soton.ac.uk