A system console is a command-line tool to manage the operating system and perform administrative tasks. One of the most common uses of a system console is to check the nameservers used by a domain.
When you type www.google.com into your browser's address bar, your browser sends a request to the nameserver for www.google.com. The nameserver then looks at its database to find out the IP address for google.com. When it finds the IP address, it returns that information to your browser, which displays the website for Google.
The same goes for any other domain you visit, such as www.yahoo.com. Your computer makes requests for yahoo.com just as it did for google.com. In order to get these requests answered, your computer uses the IP addresses listed on the nameserver's database.
This tutorial will show you how to use the system console to check the nameservers used by a domain on Windows and Linux.
Steps to check the current nameservers for any domain name from a Linux system:
Host command in Linux
Host command is used to perform domain lookup operations. By using the host command, you can check the A record, SOA record, NS record, TXT record, and many other records of the domain.
Dig Command in Linux
A dig command is useful for querying DNS servers for the IP addresses associated with hostnames/domain names. In addition to being able to query DNS servers directly, dig can also query a local cache of DNS server information stored in /etc/hosts. A dig command without any arguments will return information about the current DNS server configuration.
Step 1: Open the terminal in your Linux system.
You can press Ctrl, Alt, and T keys together to open a terminal.
Step 2: Type host -t ns domain-name-com-here to check the current NS record of the domain.
Example: Let's check the demovpstest.com domain nameserver by a host command.
Command:host -t ns demovpstest.com
Output: You will see the following output:
demovpstest.com name server ns1.demovpstest.com.
demovpstest.com name server ns2.demovpstest.com.
You can also use the dig command to check the domain's nameserver.
Syntax: dig ns your-domain-name
This command shows the information about the nameservers in detail.
Steps to check the current nameservers for any domain name from a Windows system:
By using the nslookup command, we can check the current nameserver of the domain name in the windows system. This command performs DNS lookups and returns the IP address of the requested host. You can specify several options to customize the output.
nslookup www.google.com
Step 1: Press Windows + R keys together on your keyboard. After that, type cmd in the text box and press OK.
Step 2: You will now see a command prompt window where you will complete the remaining steps.
Type in the following command prompt window:
nslookup -type=ns yourdomainname.com
Example:
nslookup -type=ns google.com
nslookup -type=ns demovpstest.com
Conclusion:
In this tutorial, you learned how to check nameservers using System Console in Windows and Linux.
That’s it.
