How to Test Your DNS Server on a 2000 Server

DNS servers resolve IPs to friendly names.

Domain Name Servers (DNS) provide resolution from an IP address to a friendly name. DNS servers are also used to resolve friendly names to IP addresses. When you enter a domain in your Web browser, the first process used on the Internet to find the server is querying the domain name server for the IP address. You can quickly check your DNS servers on the Windows 2000 machine using the "ping" command.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

1. Click the Windows "Start" button and select "Run." In the text box, enter "cmd" and press "OK." This opens your Windows command prompt where you can test the DNS server.

2. Type "ping -a <ip_address>" into the command prompt and press "Enter." Replace "<ip_address>" with the IP of your server. The "-a" switch indicates that the IP address should be resolved to the friendly name. Because DNS servers resolve IP addresses to friendly domain names, it forces the Windows 2000 machine to make a call to the DNS server. This tests to make sure the DNS server is working properly.

3. View the results of the ping command. The first line returned verifies if the DNS server was able to translate the IP address to a friendly name. Below is an example from the ping command:

   Pinging my_server [192.168.0.22] with 32 bytes of data:

   The "my_server" is the name of your server on the network. The IP address next to it is the result of the DNS server. If the DNS server fails, the name is not returned.

References

• Windows Networking: Quickly Check DNS Servers