The primary means for querying DNS servers from a Windows system is the command line tool nslookup.
To launch the nslookup utility:
Step 1 Go to the bottom of the Start Menu.
Step 2 Enter cmd to open a command prompt.
Step 3 Enter nslookup in the command prompt.
nslookup is used in Windows systems in a similar fashion to the Unix dig command line tool. You can use nslookup anywhere in NS1’s knowledgebase where the dig command is referenced. nslookup will allow you to query a nameserver to observe its behavior when serving certain DNS records.
To query for an A record, add the domain name after nslookup in the command prompt.
nslookup ns1.com ns1.com is the domain A record queried.
Server: 127.0.0.1
Address: 127.0.0.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: ns1.com
Address: 104.20.48.182 IP address returned as an A record.
Name: ns1.com
Address: 104.20.49.182 IP address returned as an A record.
nslookup can also be called to query a specific DNS server as well as query for different types of DNS resource records.
In this case we queried the domain ‘ns1.com’ and specified both the record type (NS) and the DNS server to query directly (dns1.p01.nsone.net). The output shows the 4 nameserver records for ‘ns1.com’.
nslookup -querytype=NS ns1.com dns1.p01.nsone.net
Server: dns1.p01.nsone.net
Address: 198.51.44.1#53
ns1.com nameserver = dns1.p01.nsone.net.
ns1.com nameserver = dns2.p01.nsone.net.
ns1.com nameserver = dns3.p01.nsone.net.
ns1.com nameserver = dns4.p01.nsone.net.