The Domain Name System (DNS) is the master name service for the Internet. This web page allows you to retrieve information from DNS in a simple and friendly way. There are two kinds of basic queries that you can perform with this service. Both of them are simple and fast; which one you use depends on what information you have to start with.
Both kinds of searches support several different result type options. Here are short descriptions of what the various result type options mean:
Results are always presented in tabular form. If you would also like to see the raw results, check the box labeled "View output log". If the basic search form does not give you enough control, please try the advanced search form.
Below the search form you'll find some more information about DNS, how it works, and how this service can be useful to you.
On a computer network like the Internet, every directly participating computer or other device must have a network address. The main protocol used on the Internet is IP (for Internet Protocol), and addresses used for IP look like this: 206.251.3.210. These numbers aren't very friendly for people to use; people would rather remember names, like "ftp.corel.com." The Domain Name System (DNS) is the global distributed service that handles these kinds of names. Basically, the DNS has four primary jobs:
DNS naming is a hierarchical, or tree-structured, scheme. Every name belongs to some domain, which may be part of some larger domain, and so on. Usually, domains represent some kind of organization, company, group, country, or kind of activity. Names are always written with the biggest, most general part last. For example, the name "www.cs.cmu.edu" refers to a web service computer, in the computer science department, at Carnegie-Mellon University.
With millions of names and millions of computers to keep track of, you might wonder how the DNS works as quickly and transparently as it does. The secret is that DNS is a distributed system. No single computer or company manages the entire domain name tree. Instead, each domain has a couple of computers that provide information about the names within that domain. These servers automatically find out information about eachother as necessary, in order to fulfill users requests. Also, every server automatically caches information that it retrieves, so that later requests for the same information can be satisfied more quickly.
This search service uses a tool intended for DNS management: nslookup. If you have access to a Unix, Linux, or Windows NT computer, you also have the ability to use nslookup. However, if you connect to the Internet through a slow modem, then this web gateway may be faster than running nslookup on your own machine. (Why? Because this gateway runs on a machine that has a very fast and reliable network link to the Internet, and can therefore perform network exchanges more quickly, and because this gateway runs on a machine with a heavily used DNS server that keeps data cached for faster retrieval.)
For more information about DNS visit some of the web sites listed below.
Here are some web sites with Domain Name tools and information about the Domain Name System.
The DNS Resource Directory
Amnesi - Internet Name Search Engine
DomToolsWeb - Domain Tools Online
DomainSearch - multi-domain lookup
The DNS Setup FAQ
INTERNIC - Domain Name Services
ICANN
The Domain Name System is the property of the entire Internet community, and should not be abused. Provider of this DNS Gateway Service reserves the right to log all usage, and to refuse service at the provider's discretion.
Comments and suggestions about this service are welcome. Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com.
The Perl source code for this CGI program is available upon request.
The DNS Gateway has served approximately 8898
requests since 6 Oct 2000. Prior to that, it served about 50000 requests
since mid-1998.
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DNS Gateway CGI service written and maintained by Neal Ziring, most recent modifications 6 Oct 2000.