You can find it in the Ubuntu repositories as udns-utils, the same on Debian Jessie (Wheezy seems not to have it). It belongs to the djbdns name server which was written from the scratch for exactly the same reasons you're looking after a replacement to bind, and is described e.g. This candidate seems to be completely independent from any bind library. Interestingly, the dig tool comes with the very same package, at least on Ubuntu: dnsutils. And again, specifying a name server is optional. Below I walk through how a computer uses DNS to resolve names. DNS will take the easy to remember name and map it to the IP address so devices can communicate. It would be hard to remember the IP address of every website or resource you access, words are easier to remember. The syntax here would be: dig the same task described above. Computer and other network devices communicate by IP address. By default, dig produces much more detailed output. digĪs nslookup was declared "deprecated" a while ago, today one should use dig. the host is a simple utility for performing DNS lookups.
Non-interactive mode Query IP of domain Query domain name DNS service provider Query mail server Interactive mode Option-A-AAAA-CNAME-HINFO-MB-MG-MR-MX-NS-PTR-TXT HOST. type=mx for the SMTP MX records of a domain, or type=ns for the name servers. Nslookup is a command line tool included with most operating systems that allows a user to look up a network name server, as well as return IP addresses and domain names for a network server. There's an interactive command-line interface as well, and you can specify which type of address you're looking for – e.g. Would request the IP of from a name server listening at port 53 at 4.2.2.4. As you requested, it supports an optional parameter to specify which name server to use (by default it checks which one is configured with your system): nslookup 4.2.2.4 This tool ships with the dnsutils package – which in fact is described as Clients provided with BIND, but definitely does not require bind itself (though it uses one of its libraries, libbind). Note that I'm also using the Unbound name server in my local network here :) nslookup Several of them come even pre-installed, but most of them are at least available via the standard repositories. There are multiple command-line solutions available on Linux.