Domains and DNS are part of the internet. A domain will resolve to an IP address using DNS as the mechanism for doing this. For example, a when a computer looks up a TLD (Top Level Domain) domain.com it will resolve to an IP address e.g. 111.111.111.111 and the mechanism for doing this is a DNS lookup.
You can use a number of tools to accomplish this, in Windows you can use nslookup and in Linux you can use dig. We will list the commands here with different examples.
Windows
Windows already has an inbuild DNS tool so no extra configuration is required.
Commands
Basic domain resolution, gets an IP address of where the domain is pointing to.
nslookup domain.com
Select a specific DNS server to do a domain lookup on where 8.8.8.8 is DNS server you wish to use and domain.com is the domain you wish to lookup. This is useful to see whether a particular DNS server is able to resolve a domain or has the zone records loaded in.
nslookup server 8.8.8.8 domain.com
Look up a SRV record, enter in nslookup utility by entering nslookup into a cmd prompt.
nslookup set type=all _autodiscover._tcp.domain.com
Linux
Firstly make sure that DIG is installed on your Linux server.
# Centos, Redhat etc use the following sudo yum install bind-utils sudo yum install whois # Debian and Ubuntu, use the following sudo apt install dnsutils sudo apt install whois
Commands
Basic domain resolution, gets an IP address of where the domain is pointing to.
dig domain.com
Select a specific DNS server to do a domain lookup on where 8.8.8.8 is DNS server you wish to use and domain.com is the domain you wish to lookup. This is useful to see whether a particular DNS server is able to resolve a domain or has the zone records loaded in. Enter in the desired DNS server after the @ symbol in the command line.
dig domain.com @8.8.8.8
Lookup a SRV record
dig srv _autodiscover._tcp.domain.com
