Nslookup Notes
Interactive Commands
1 To interrupt interactive commands at any time, type CTRL+C.
2 To exit, type exit.
3 The command line length must be less than 256 characters.
4 To treat a built-in command as a computer name, precede it with the escape
character (\).
5 An unrecognized command is interpreted as a computer name.
Diagnostics
If the lookup request fails, an error message prints. Possible errors are:
Timed out
The server did not respond to a request after a certain amount of time
(changed with set timeout=value) and a certain number of retries (changed with set retry=value).
No response from server
No DNS name server is running on the server computer.
No records
The DNS name server does not have resource records of the current query type
for the computer, although the computer name is valid. The query type is
specified with the set querytype command.
Non-existent domain
The computer or DNS domain name does not exist.
Connection refused
-or-
Network is unreachable
The connection to the DNS name server or finger server could not be made. This
error commonly occurs with ls and finger requests.
Server failure
The DNS name server found an internal inconsistency in its database and could
not return a valid answer.
Refused
The DNS name server refused to service the request.
Format error
The DNS name server found that the request packet was not in the proper
format. It may indicate an error in nslookup.
References
For in-depth coverage of nslookup, see DNS and BIND by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu, published by O
Nslookup
