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)