Rbldnsd: June 2007 Archives

I have come across a couple of handy little trick for DNS recently which I'm going to throw up here just to save me searching when I need them in the future :)

Getting The Version Of A DNS Server

To get the version of a DNS server, you can run the following command:

dig @dns_server_you_want_to_check +short version.bind chaos txt

It is very easy for the server administrator to change this to whatever they want, but it's still a handy command.

Getting The Whois Server For A Top Level Domain

I found the following command for finding the whois server for a TLD on the Nominet Blog.

dig +short _nicname._tcp.ie srv

This should return:

10 0 43 whois.domainregistry.ie.

This means that the whois server for .ie is listening to port 43 at whois.domainregistry.ie. Unfortunately, not all TLDs support this, most noticeably .com.