NAME

       dnstrace - dns lookup tool

SYNOPSIS

       dnstrace t fqdn r

DESCRIPTION

       dnstrace  searches for all DNS servers that can affect the resolution of records of type t
       under the domain name fqdn, starting from the root server r.  You can list more  than  one
       root server.

       dnstrace uses the standard DNS resolution algorithm, but follows all possible paths in the
       algorithm.  It prints all responses it receives from DNS servers; it also prints  warnings
       about  slow  servers,  dead  servers,  misdelegated  (``lame'')  servers, and misformatted
       packets.  dnstrace is similar in spirit to DOC and dnswalk but is much more effective than
       those tools at debugging resolution problems.

       In  versions  1.03  and  above:  You  can pipe dnstrace through dnstracesort(1) for human-
       friendly output.  dnstrace can take a long time to run, so standard procedure is  to  save
       its output in a file:

         dnstrace any www.aol.com a.root-servers.net > AOL &

       Then you can run dnstracesort(1) to see the results so far:

         dnstracesort < AOL | less

       The  dnstracesort(1)  output  uses  ul  codes  for boldface and underline; these codes are
       displayed properly by less(1).

       Beware that, as of January 2001, dnstrace produces more than 5 megabytes of output for the
       complete  trace  of  cr.yp.to starting from all the root servers.  It ends up sending more
       than 6000 queries to more than 200 different servers.

SEE ALSO

       dnsip(1), dnsipq(1), dnsmx(1), dnstxt(1), dnsqr(1), dnsq(1), dnsname(1), less(1), tinydns-
       get(1)

       http://cr.yp.to/djbdns.html

                                                                                      dnstrace(1)