Father, vegetarian, humanist, nerd
Using dig to view, backup and verify DNS zone records on OS X
I was recently asked by a client to consolidate all of their DNS zone records and domain name registrations from 2 separate services to a single provider. The FAQ page of the current DNS service recommended using the named-xfer shell command, but that utility isn’t available on OS X. I googled around and learned that dig is a suitable alternative.
Finding the nameservers
Dig can be used to find nameserver information for a given domain:
1 2 3 4 | $ dig yourdomain.com NS +short ns1.nameserver.com. ns2.nameserver.com. ns3.nameserver.com. |
Viewing and Backing up DNS Records
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 | $ dig @ns1.nameserver.com yourdomain.com IN ANY ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ; < <>> DiG 9.8.3-P1 < <>> @ns1.nameserver.com yourdomain.com IN ANY ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER< <- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 12683 ;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 7, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 5 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;yourdomain.com. IN ANY ;; ANSWER SECTION: yourdomain.com. 14400 IN NS ns1.nameserver.com. yourdomain.com. 14400 IN NS ns2.nameserver.com. yourdomain.com. 14400 IN NS ns3.nameserver.com. yourdomain.com. 14400 IN MX 0 mx1.balanced.homie.mail.nameserver.com. yourdomain.com. 14400 IN MX 0 mx2.balanced.homie.mail.nameserver.com. yourdomain.com. 14400 IN A 69.163.240.35 yourdomain.com. 14400 IN SOA ns1.nameserver.com. hostmaster.nameserver.com. 2013122000 16668 1800 1814400 14400 ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: ns1.nameserver.com. 14400 IN A 66.33.206.206 ns2.nameserver.com. 14400 IN A 208.96.10.221 ns3.nameserver.com. 14400 IN A 66.33.216.216 mx1.balanced.homie.mail.nameserver.com. 14400 IN A 208.97.132.209 mx2.balanced.homie.mail.nameserver.com. 14400 IN A 208.97.132.210 ;; Query time: 150 msec ;; SERVER: 66.33.206.206#53(66.33.206.206) ;; WHEN: Tue Feb 4 16:17:59 2014 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 305</code> |
Backing these up just requires you to send that output to a file: dig @ns1.nameserver.com yourdomain.com IN ANY >> dns-backup-yourdomain.com-ns1.nameserver.com
Once you’ve updated the nameservers for a domain you can verify if they’ve changed using the dig yourdomain.com NS +short command.
Other useful dig commands
1 2 | $ dig yourdomain.com A +short 69.163.240.35 |
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