[ On Friday, August 27, 1999 at 16:15:34 (+0100), Hugh Sasse wrote: ]
> Subject: [Exim] contrib: testing relaying without learning SMTP
>
> However, Philip tells me not everyone has nslookup.
If a system will run Exim and has any kind of version of BIND then I
doubt that very much actually. Sometimes 'nslookup' is not in an
ordinary user's default search path though (often it is in /usr/sbin on
most *BSDs).
> Some FreeBSD
> people have a command called host instead. As far as I can glean
> from the WWW it returns results in the form
> <hostname> is <dotted-quad>
> or it fails with
> Host not found
That version of 'host' is sadly very ancient (>12 years!) and probably
shouldn't be used any more (people do usually have it though, often
because it's unfortunately still part of the default BIND install --
i.e. it's not FreeBSD specific). It was originally a BSD tool borrowed
from Rutgers, but seems to have been dropped by BSD along with all the
other DNS tools once the BIND folks took over managing BIND.
The modern version of 'host', which is light years ahead of the ancient
BSD one, is always available here, and its use should be strongly
encouraged over the old broken one:
ftp://ftp.nikhef.nl/pub/network/host.tar.Z
(it is updated frequently and that canonical URL alwasy seems to point
to the most recent release)
It should compile and work fine on almost any Unix, M$-DOS/NT, etc. that
already has a DNS resolver library.
(IMNSHO the modern 'host' is also light years ahead of even the most
recent versions of 'nslookup' and 'dig' too! ;-)
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 218-0098 VE3TCP <gwoods@???> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
