By default, Cox will DHCP to your systems some DNS servers which behave like OpenDNS, i.e., if there is a DNS name miss, the servers will show a hit which is a Cox search page. This can confuse a lot of things. Cox has provided a way around this:
for residential at least, it uses these two IPs as static DNS:
68.105.28.13 68.105.29.13
and these do appear to be noticeably faster!
A great place to find them:
http://internethelp.centurylink.com/internethelp/dns-ctl.html
Here is the canonical source:
To pull up a list of all DNS records for a single hostname:
dig +nocmd yourdomain.com any +multiline +noall +answer
Here is an interesting list:
http://www.debianadmin.com/bind-dns-server-web-interfacefrontend-or-gui-tools.html
But the best may be here:
SPF records are DNS entries for entire domains, which do a whole lot to prevent spam. They are required on the sender side, these days, for email to be successfully received by many carriers small and large, including Yahoo and Embarq and many others. For lots of general information:
For more details and syntax:
In Server 2008, the default protocol is IPv6. It is not recommended to disable it in any way.
Default DNS, internal and LAN-wide, is therefore also IPv6. All you really need is an AAAA record for the forward lookup. But in many cases reverse lookup will have been skipped at server setup, and in such a case, it can get confusing to try to set up reverse DNS. Reverse DNS is definitely recommended, it will smoothen out the LAN in general.
It has been very difficult to find any instructions to set up reverse IPv6 DNS on Server 2008. Howsomever, here is one.
For non-LAN-domain workstations, and as forwarders for LAN domain controllers, and also as servers for Exchange and other SMTP server lookups, the best DNS servers around are the OpenDNS servers:
208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
and the Google Public DNS servers:
8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
OpenDNS is considerably more functional; one can use it to prevent web sites from being accessed, and there are quite a few other features. Google’s are sometimes faster, sometimes slower; but they are certainly easier to remember.
This one comes from the excellent David Childers.
When you start up nslookup in a command prompt, there’s a way to get some very good additional information.
C:\Documents and Settings\davidc>nslookup -d2 ------------ SendRequest(), len 41 HEADER: opcode = QUERY, id = 1, rcode = NOERROR header flags: query, want recursion questions = 1, answers = 0, authority records = 0, additional = 0 QUESTIONS: 3.1.16.172.in-addr.arpa, type = PTR, class = IN ------------ ------------ Got answer (78 bytes): HEADER: opcode = QUERY, id = 1, rcode = NOERROR header flags: response, auth. answer, want recursion, recursion avail. questions = 1, answers = 1, authority records = 0, additional = 0 QUESTIONS: 3.1.16.172.in-addr.arpa, type = PTR, class = IN ANSWERS: -> 3.1.16.172.in-addr.arpa type = PTR, class = IN, dlen = 25 name = ***-***.********.local ttl = 1200 (20 mins) ------------ Default Server: ***-***.********.local Address: 172.16.1.3 --------------------------------------------
As you can see, by using the command nslookup -d2, the entirety of the conversation that nslookup is having with the DNS server is displayed.
If you believe that nslookup has locked up or died, you will be able to see the timeouts occurring as it waits for response from the DNS server.
I hope that helps!
:-)
To find out ownership of Internet IP addresses, try this:
https://www.arin.net/