3 Linux Commands Which Help Me With Domaining

I’ve been a Systems Administrator on and off for the last several years and one thing that I have found irreplaceable is the Linux operating system. My favorite distro of Linux is CentOS. I’ve grown to love absolutely everything about the distro and I’m constantly expanding my knowledge of it by trying new things. As a domain investor, I’m always thinking about how to access information faster to help me save time. Since I am a Linux user and I am sure some of you out there are as well or are thinking about it, I figured it would be fun to list a few commands that help me with domaining.

whois – This is one of my favorite Linux commands. When combined with a domain name (ex. whois google.com) it retrieves the Domain Name System (DNS) records pertaining to that particular name. This is exactly what I use it for. It provides me with the whois information via command line, which is more convenient to me then loading up a browser window and utilizing a web-based whois tool.

On a side note, I installed the minimal version of CentOS 6 (64-bit) on my home office server. This version of CentOS comes with the absolute bare minimum. Since this is the case I had to install the jwhois package to be able to use the whois command. To install jwhois on the minimal installation of CentOS I typed yum install jwhois.

nslookup – This command allows me to query Internet nameservers for a host or a domain. If I need the ip address of where a specific domain name is being hosted (ex. nslookup jasonthompson.co) this is the command that I use to do it. It will provide me with the IP address of the server that the specific domain name is pointed to.

Since I am running the minimal version of CentOS 6 (64-bit) I had to install this tool. To install nslookup I typed yum install bind-utils.

dig - There’s not much more I can say about this command that hasn’t already been said. Dig is a dns look up utility. I can retrieve all of the record types for a specific domain (ex. dig jasonthompson.co any) using this command. If I need to find out if my mail records are configured properly I can type dig jasonthompson.co mx which will retrieve the mx information for my domain.

I’ve only touched the surface of what these commands can do and now that I have my Linux box up and running at home I will be spending less time in a browser and more time using the Linux command line. Yes, some of these tools can be configured to work on Windows, but for me it just doesn’t feel the same. I guess that just might be the Linux geek in me.