DNS query tool (host(1) or nslookup(1) replacement)

Question

I'm looking for a command-line tool that can query a name server for an IP address.

Something like host(1) as provided by BIND.

# query the name server at 4.2.2.4 for the name example.org
$ host example.org 4.2.2.4

I found Unbound which provides a host(1) replacement but alas, it cannot query custom name servers AFAICT.

I know BIND provides tools that do just that but I would like to avoid those if possible. Bonus points if it is packaged on Debian.

Answer 1

You can use getent. See getent --help.

$ getent hosts google.com
172.217.194.139 google.com
172.217.194.102 google.com
172.217.194.100 google.com
172.217.194.101 google.com
172.217.194.138 google.com
172.217.194.113 google.com

Ref: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/120710/alternative-to-nslookup-in-rhel7?newreg=df3c1f65191748f8873c294bffad2fde

Answer 2

I haven't tried and don't have Debian box, but there is an alternative to bindutils called ldns which provides a utility called drill that is supposed to work similar to dig. ldnsutils should be available as a debian pacakge and might do what you want.

Answer 3

There are multiple command-line solutions available on Linux. Several of them come even pre-installed, but most of them are at least available via the standard repositories. Note that I'm also using the Unbound name server in my local network here :)

nslookup

This tool ships with the dnsutils package – which in fact is described as Clients provided with BIND, but definitely does not require bind itself (though it uses one of its libraries, libbind). As you requested, it supports an optional parameter to specify which name server to use (by default it checks which one is configured with your system):

nslookup example.org 4.2.2.4

would request the IP of example.org from a name server listening at port 53 at 4.2.2.4. There's an interactive command-line interface as well, and you can specify which type of address you're looking for – e.g. type=mx for the SMTP MX records of a domain, or type=ns for the name servers.

dig

As nslookup was declared "deprecated" a while ago, today one should use dig. By default, dig produces much more detailed output. The syntax here would be:

dig example.org @4.2.2.4

for the same task described above. And again, specifying a name server is optional. Interestingly, the dig tool comes with the very same package, at least on Ubuntu: dnsutils.

dnsip

This candidate seems to be completely independent from any bind library. It belongs to the djbdns name server which was written from the scratch for exactly the same reasons you're looking after a replacement to bind, and is described e.g. in this article. You can find it in the Ubuntu repositories as udns-utils, the same on Debian Jessie (Wheezy seems not to have it). But unfortunately, dnsip does not support specifying the name server at the command line.