Retrieve DNS Records with Dig

One of the most difficult parts of my job is managing DNS settings. It's not that DNS is a particularly difficult thing to manage, but it's somewhat foreign to me because they don't teach it in school and there are huge consequences for messing things up. Not only can a business' website be down, but their email as well. Whenever I need to retrieve DNS records from a nameserver, I use Cygwin and dig.

For this example, we'll pretend that we need to retrieve the MX records for the davidwalsh.name domain. Here's the format of how you use dig:

dig @[nameserver] [domain] [record type]

To get a domains nameserver addresses, you'll need to do a WHOIS search. Click here to learn how to do that. I know that davidwalsh.name's nameserver is NS2.DREAMHOST.COM, so now I can find my domain's MX records:

dig @ns2.dreamhost.com davidwalsh.name MX

The above returns:

; <<>> DiG 9.3.2 <<>> @ns2.dreamhost.com davidwalsh.name mx
; (1 server found)
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 736
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;davidwalsh.name.               IN      MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
davidwalsh.name.        14400   IN      MX      0 mx1.balanced.frisky.mail.dreamhost.com.
davidwalsh.name.        14400   IN      MX      0 mx2.balanced.frisky.mail.dreamhost.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
mx1.balanced.frisky.mail.dreamhost.com. 14400 IN A 208.113.200.12
mx2.balanced.frisky.mail.dreamhost.com. 14400 IN A 208.113.200.11

;; Query time: 77 msec
;; SERVER: 208.96.10.221#53(208.96.10.221)
;; WHEN: Mon Aug 04 17:09:23 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 139

The MX servers are "mx1.balanced.frisky.mail.dreamhost.com" and "mx2.balanced.frisky.mail.dreamhost.com". Just the information we needed!