nslookup

Yeah.

It's called NSlookup or name server lookup.

Whether you are on Mac, Linux, or Windows, you literally just open a terminal, type NSlookup, followed by the target domain, and you are directly asking the domain name system to hand over its routing cards.

So let's dive into those routing cards for a second, the DNS records.

It's not just translating a name to a number.

Yeah.

It is a perfect example of why mapping these records is so critical, because misconfigurations in the map itself actually become the vulnerabilities.

Okay, so NSlookup gives us the destination, but it doesn't really show us the journey.

In fact, it very much describes that process I spoke of in our rewind question, where you're asking a DNS server of a fully qualified domain name, such as portal.example.com. And that DNS server is going to provide you back with an IP address, in this case, 10.20.30.99. That is the nslookup command.

I guess this is not the output you would get from DIG, but if the operating system that you're running does have DIG, both of those work in very similar ways.

This one happens to be the NSLookup command, and the entire command line we used for this was NSLookupPortal.Example.com. We are doing a name server lookup of this fully qualified domain name.

And we're hoping to get an IP address back.

And in fact, we did get an IP address back.

So I will tell you that not only are you picking out five different answers for this performance-based question, but you are also maybe looking at a list of all of the potential answers for a lot of other things.

So all of the possible commands that are on here, this list, cd, dar, ipconfig, ping, netstat, nslookup, netuse, traceroute, pathping, checkdisk, et cetera, all of those come directly from the exam objectives.

So if you're looking through that list and you, I know what that one does, I know what that one does, I know what that one does, You run across a command that maybe you aren't quite sure what it does.

Make a note of that one because you need to know that for your exam.

So we rely on DNS to perform that resolution behind the scenes.

It provides the IP address to your browser, and then your browser goes directly to my web server to be able to access the videos, the downloadable content, everything that you need to see on my website.

nslookup, great little utility that does not only this function but a lot more as well that might be a useful one to play around with.

And the last task on our list, obtain the newest domain group policy settings.