[ale] OT: DNS query (dig) question

[Joe Steele]

On Tuesday, May 11, 2004 11:42 AM, Fulton Green wrote:
>
> Back in the "nslookup" days, I could do a query on all the registered
> hostnames for a given domain, something akin to:
>
>    nslookup> ls -d somedomain.com > somedomainhosts.txt
>
> Now that nslookup is deprecated, I was wondering if there was a similar
> way to perform this type of query, or if this type of query has since
> been deemed a security risk.
>

nslookup performs this action using a zone transfer.  The same action 
can be performed with dig:

    dig @authoritative-server somedomain.com axfr > somedomainhosts.txt

Many domain name servers will block zone transfers (a form of 
security through obscurity), so the operation will not always succeed 
(regardless of whether you use nslookup or dig).

--Joe