In Linux, when you use nslookup, the following message comes up, why ?

"nslookup is deprecated and may be removed from future releases.
Consider using the `dig' or `host' programs instead"

What is wrong using nslookup, while you can do a name search in a very
convinent way :
e.g. nslookup -querytype=mx yahoo.com x.x.x.x (to do a domain name
resolving thru a specified bind server)

Any idea ?

Probably there's nothing wrong with it; it just isn't being actively maintained.

Thanks, just curious about :

are there any bugs/security holes on nslookup so it is "deprecated and may be removed from future releases"

There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that there are three different tools to resolve DNS information and it's redudent (the other two are "host" and "dig"). Someone made a decision that nslookup is the first one to get yanked (at some point, but I'm betting it won't be removed for a looooong time).

just do alias nslookup='/usr/sbin/nslookup -sil'
You can put that in your .bashrc, or whatever your shell's rc file is and that will alias the command every time you log in.

Oh, I should also say that the recommended action would be to learn the syntax of host and dig, that way you won't be left in the dust. dig is actually very powerful and much more informational than nslookup.

Actually, this is very much not correct.

http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoyne...kup-flaws.html
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/nslookup.html

Cheers,
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Rick, those objection pages are ancient. It would have been very easy for you to take 10 seconds and verify this is not the case with current nslookup. Speaking of very ancient, you just bumped a 5 year old post. Was that really necessary?

I agree people shouldn't use nslookup (dig is much better for diagnostics, and host is much simpler for basics), but spreading false information isn't exactly helping your cause.

/me fetches the debian-squeeze package containing nslookup, verifies that it still has its own internal resolver, and behaves in various odd ways that don't impair its successors.

Nope, still pretty broken.

Yes, indeed: The referenced thread comes up prominently in searches on nslookup.

Perhaps you would not mind informing me what my "cause" is. I'm a bit vague on that point. (I hope you are not going to call me a djbware fanboy, as that would be excessively ironic.)

Cheers,
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Seems fine to me. You have to fully-qualify the name you're looking for with the trailing dot if you're looking for a TLD.

That is correct but not relevant to what I said.

During the time you were conducting that exercise, I also reviewed all entries about nslookup within BIND's changelog over the past decade, and found (as expected) zero changes to address the problematic behaviour.

Anyway, aren't you going to get around to explaining to me what my "cause" is? Curious minds want to know, and all that.

Cheers,
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

This is an old post but it continues to come up as a top hit on the question of nslookup being deprecated.
Wikipedia states:

"Early in the development of BIND 9, the Internet Systems Consortium planned to deprecate nslookup in favor of host and dig. However, this decision was reversed in 2004 with the release of BIND 9.3,[1] and nslookup has been fully supported since then."

I still use nslookup at work and don't even have dig or host available.

Jim, first of all hello and welcome to LQ.

Not like there is any rule to adding to old posts but for your first post we were expecting simply a hello sort of thing.