The Internet

I'm risking sounding trite, but the Web and Internet in general is an important tool. It's especially important for DNS. The newsgroups and mailing lists mentioned in Chapter 15, "Compiling and Maintaining BIND," are excellent places to learn of, and about, DNS and the tools people use. If you don't have time to read them everyday, they are still an excellent resource if accessed through a service such as the Usenet archive at deja.com, which has a searchable archive of news. If in doubt, search there first. The URL is http://www.deja.com/usenet.

Web sites do, of course, exist that are dedicated to DNS. One of the best known is the DNS Resources Directory at http://www.dns.net/dnsrd/. It is really the only URL you'll ever need when it comes to DNS. A separate, very extensive, Tools to Manage DNS page is also available there.

Internet-Based Tools

Getting someone else's view of your domain can be useful, especially if you are experiencing complaints from outside your organization about things not working, and you can't figure out why from the inside.

ZoneCheck

ZoneCheck is a Web-based tool used by the French NIC to enable their clients to check whether the zones they want to register are available. You can use this prior to registration, and periodically thereafter. It is at http://www.nic.fr/zonecheck/english.html. You also will find the source code there.

DigIt

DigIt is a Web interface to dig provided by Men&Mice. It enables you to see how your domain resolves from the outside, using the nameserver at Men&Mice if you want. Its URL is http://us.mirror.menandmice.com/cgi-bin/DoDig.

Internet Query Tools

This very diverse service is provided by Demon Internet. It lets you check almost anything you can think of, including whois lookups. You can find it at http://www.demon.net/external/ntools.shtml.