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Where the heck did "nslookup" and "dig" go in ADC 13.1 ??


Go to solution Solved by Chella Kumar,

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This is a question that I've been asked a lot recently.

Historically, most administrators wouldn't use "host" because the functionality is quite rudimentary. Instead, those my age will likely default to "nslookup", and younger people might look to use "dig".

"nslookup" allowed the administrator to send DNS queries to a name server of their choice. The administrator could ask about any record, thereby confirming that DNS was working and diagnosing issues.

"nslookup" was deprecated a long time ago, I believe around 2007. However, old habits die hard, many people keep using the command, and it was eventually undeprecated with BIND 9.9.0.

"dig" was the replacement for "nslookup". While "nslookup" didn't use the operating system's DNS client libraries (it used its own internal DNS client), "dig" used the same libraries as your applications and would give a more consistent result. 

The syntax for using "nslookup" and "dig" differed but from about 2010 onwards, "dig" was the preferred default. 

"Dig" was part of "Bind", a standard name server platform. FreeBSD 10.0 onwards shipped (in 2014) with another more lightweight and high-performance name server known as "Unbound". "Unbound" has a similar tool to "Dig" called "Drill", and the syntax is mostly the same.

Before Citrix ADC 13.1, the ADC incorporated a custom FreeBSD distribution based on FreeBSD 8.4, which Citrix patched and maintained. 

Citrix ADC 13.1 moved to a custom FreeBSD distribution based on FreeBSD 11.4 and, in doing so, removed the "nslookup" and "dig" commands.

Today, you can achieve the same result as running "dig" with the command "drill". 

root@steven-lab# drill www.google.com @8.8.8.8

;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, rcode: NOERROR, id: 57980

;; flags: qr rd ra ; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;; www.google.com. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

www.google.com. 300 IN A 142.250.187.196

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:

;; Query time: 53 msec

;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8

;; WHEN: Thu Jun 9 11:04:55 2022

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 48

root@steven-lab# 

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