How to see DNS resolving in action with NSLOOKUP for windows

[techAdmin]

There's a nice little tool you can use if you have Windows 2000 or XP, to reach it, click 'start', then 'run', type in 'cmd'. This will open the command line window.

Once the command line window is open, enter the following:

nslookup Hit enter, this starts the program.
set d2 Hit enter, this puts it into debugging mode, which allows you to see the Time To Live information along with other things.

Type the domain name you want to research, hit enter.

You will see an output screen, which shows all the relevant information for that domain. This is especially useful for example if you want to see what data center you are connecting to when you go to google.

Here's an example screenshot of what it looks like. As you can see, Google is resolving to three different IP addresses, which are 3 different data centers, and your request will go to the one that is most able to handle further load: