Performing DNS Queries

Table of contents:

Problem

You want to find the IP address corresponding to a domain name, or see whether a domain provides a certain service (such as an email server).

Solution

Use the Resolv:: DNS class in the standard resolv library to perform DNS lookups. The most commonly used method is DNS#each_address, which iterates over the IP addresses assigned to a domain name.

	require 
esolv
	 
Resolv::DNS.new.each_address("oreilly.com") { |addr| puts addr }
	# 208.201.239.36
	# 208.201.239.37

Discussion

If you need to check the existence of a particular type of DNS record (such as a MX record for a mail server), use DNS#getresources or the iterator DNS#each_resource. Both methods take a domain name and a class denoting a type of DNS record. They perform a DNS lookup and, for each matching DNS record, return an instance of the given class.

These are the three most common classes:

DNS::Resource::IN::A: Indicates a DNS record pointing to an IP address for the domain.
DNS::RESOURCE::IN::NS: Indicates a DNS record pointing to a DNS nameserver.
DNS::Resource::IN::MX: Indicates a DNS record pointing to a mail server.

This code finds the mail servers and name servers responsible for oreilly.com:

	dns = 
Resolv::DNS.new
	domain = "oreilly.com"
	dns.each_resource(domain, Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::MX) do |mail_server|
	 puts mail_server.exchange
	end
	# smtp1.oreilly.com
	# smtp2.oreilly.com

	dns.each_resource(domain, Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::NS) do |nameserver|
	 puts nameserver.name
	end
	# a.auth-ns.sonic.net
	# b.auth-ns.sonic.net
	# c.auth-ns.sonic.net
	# ns.oreilly.com

If your application needs to do a lot of DNS lookups, you can greatly speed things up by creating a separate thread for each lookup. Most of the time spent doing a DNS lookup is spent connecting to the network, so doing all the lookups in parallel can save a lot of time. If you do this, you should include the resolv-replace library along with resolv, to make sure your DNS lookups are thread-safe.

Heres some code that sees which one-letter .com domains (a.com, b.com, etc.) are mapped to IP addresses. It runs all 26 DNS queries at once, in 26 threads, and summarizes the results.

	require 
esolv-replace
	def multiple_lookup(*names)
	 
dns = 
Resolv::DNS.new
	 results = {}
	 threads = []
	 names.each do |name|
	 threads << Thread.new(name) do |name|
	 begin
	 dns.each_address(name) { |a| (results[name] ||= []) << a }
	 rescue Resolv::ResolvError
	 results[name] = nil
	 end
	 end
	 end
	 threads.each { |t| t.join }
	 return results
	end

	domains = ("a".."z").collect { |l| l + .com }
	multiple_lookup(*domains).each do |name, addresses|
	 if addresses
	 puts "#{name}: #{addresses.size} address#{addresses.size == 1 ? "" : "es"}"
	 end
	end
	# x.com: 4 addresses
	# z.com: 1 address
	# q.com: 1 address

Problem

Solution

Discussion

See Also