IT Employment

OK, heres the 5-cent tour of NSLOOKUP! When you type in NSLOOKUP and hit the enter key, this places you in the lookup mode and you get a different prompt. When in this mode, you do not type NSLOOKUP again because, since you are already in the lookupmode, what it is looking for now is the machine name (which may have to be 'fully qualified', meaning it is the machine name plus the domain name in dot notation e.g. 'machine.domain.area.com') or IP address you are trying to do the lookup on. If you enter NSLOOKUP at this prompt then the name server will try to resolve NSLOOKUP into an IP address and will fail, causing the timeout reply you indicated. Your nameserver is working correctly. If you are at the DOS prompt you can type NSLOOKUP <machine name or IP address> and it will do the lookup. You do not have to enter the actual lookup mode to perform a lookup. Where the lookup mode is handy is if you are doing multiple lookups you can enter lookup mode by typing NSLOOKUP and enter, then you can just enter the name or IP address, hit enter, enter the next name or IP, hit enter, etc. for all the lookups you want to perform. Most people use the "NSLOOKUP <name or IP>" convention to do a lookup. This concludes the current 5-cent tour. Jackie

I am having a similar problem, when using nslookup I get the following errors:
(Transcript of screen follows)

>nslookup <internal DNS Server name>
DNS request timed out.
timeout was 2 seconds.
*** Can't find server name for address <correct IP Address of internal DNS Server>: Timed out
***Default servers are not available
Server: UnKnown
Address: <correct IP Address of internal DNS Server>

Name: <internal DNS Server name>
Address: <correct IP Address>

> (back to prompt)

(end transcript)

Why won't the DNS server return its own server name (Server: Unknown)?

Any help will be appreciated.

Ken