The fourth post in my PowerShell Beginner series, “Daily Tasks, The PowerShell Way“. Use PowerShell’s Resolve-DnsName cmdlet as a more powerful successor to ‘nslookup’.
What’s in a name?
Any seasoned IT Pro knows that the names we see for servers or in web URLs ultimately need to “resolve” or translate to a numerical IP address. Computers perform this resolution using a worldwide network of Domain Name System (DNS) servers. When your browser attempts to go to https://thinkpowershell.com, your computer will send a query to a DNS server with the hostname “thinkpowershell.com”, and the DNS server will return the IP address of the server hosting the website. Your DNS server will likely have to forward a query to other DNS servers to get the correct IP address.
nslookup (name server lookup) is a command line tool that has been around for years for performing this lookup activity on demand. You can specify the hostname or website domain name for which you want to “lookup” the IP address. Additionally, with the second positional parameter you can specify the IP address of a specific DNS server you want to query. It is a helpful tool, but it only returns CNAME , A, and AAAA record information, and not as a script-usable object.