Why doesn’t `dig` show records

digdomain-name-system

Every time I use dig I get a vague feeling that I'm not really sure whether it's giving me correct data.

Now I've used it like this:

# dig socialimpactportfolio.com

; <<>> DiG 9.8.4-rpz2+rl005.12-P1 <<>> socialimpactportfolio.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 35289
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;socialimpactportfolio.com.     IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
socialimpactportfolio.com. 1799 IN      SOA     dns1.name-services.com. info.name-services.com. 2002050701 10800 3600 604800 3600

;; Query time: 121 msec
;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
;; WHEN: Thu May 22 14:01:03 2014
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 103

As you can see, there is no ANSWER section, despite the fact that there's a working website on that domain.

Why?

I'd really like a program that simply shows all the DNS records in the most non-confusing manner.

Best Answer

Your query is incorrect, or to put it differently - no, there is no entry for socialimpactportfolio.com. Dig is telling you about the problem.

The domain works in the browser, because it will helpfully try and add the www. prefix, and lo and behold:

dig www.socialimpactportfolio.com
...
www.socialimpactportfolio.com. 1783 IN  CNAME   kochi-9186.herokussl.com.

If you are looking for a tool that will somehow show you the complete zone - I think you're out of luck.

Related Solutions

Debian – Setting up a DNS name server for a mass virtual host with Bind9

Looking at the IP addresses in your resolv.conf I get the feeling that your BIND server is on 192.168.1.52. As far as I can tell, you can't specify in resolv.conf something like "for these domains, use this name server". Basically, your BIND server will never be queried. As you can see in your dig lookup (which is incorrect, it is asking for a reverse DNS entry), it tries 80.58.0.33, which I assume is your provider's DNS server.

You already set up BIND as caching nameserver by using the 'forwarders' option, so what you need to do is have only 192.168.1.52 in the client PCs as nameserver.

To see if your BIND is configured correctly, try this:

dig example.test @192.168.1.52

DNS Records – How to List All DNS Records in a Domain Using Dig

Answer

The short answer to your specific question of listing CNAMEs is that you cannot without permission to do zone transfers (see How to list all CNAME records for a given domain?).

That said, if your company's DNS server still supports the ANY query, you can use dig to list the other records by doing:

dig +noall +answer +multiline yourdomain.yourtld any

These ... +noall +answer +multiline ... are strictly optional and are simply output formatting flags to make the output more easily human readable (see dig man page ).

Example

$ dig +noall +answer +multiline bad.horse any

Returns:

bad.horse.              7200 IN A 162.252.205.157
bad.horse.              7200 IN CAA 0 issue "letsencrypt.org"
bad.horse.              7200 IN CAA 0 iodef "mailto:abuse@sandwich.net"
bad.horse.              7200 IN MX 10 mx.sandwich.net.
bad.horse.              7200 IN NS a.sn1.us.
bad.horse.              7200 IN NS b.sn1.us.
bad.horse.              7200 IN SOA a.sn1.us. n.sn1.us. (
                                2017032202 ; serial
                                1200       ; refresh (20 minutes)
                                180        ; retry (3 minutes)
                                1209600    ; expire (2 weeks)
                                60         ; minimum (1 minute)
                                )

Caveats (RFC8482)

Note that, since around 2019, most public DNS servers have stopped answering most DNS ANY queries usefully. For background on that, see: https://blog.cloudflare.com/rfc8482-saying-goodbye-to-any/

If ANY queries do not enumerate multiple records, the only option is to request each record type (e.g. A, CNAME, or MX) individually.