The Host Project
General Information
Host is based on a rewrite of the original host
program
written long ago at Rutgers University back in the early days of the
Internet's Domain Name System (DNS).
For many years the Host program was maintained by the late
Eric Wassenaar at
Nikhef-H as part of a larger suite
of very widely and commonly used networking tools. See below for more
information about the status of these other tools.
Note that a variant of the ancient Rutgers University code is still
distributed with ISC's BIND-8 main sources, and an older release of
Eric's code is distributed with the BIND-8 contributed sources. This
newer release of Host is intended to replace those very old versions.
Description
Host is a powerful and complete command-line DNS query and test tool.
Features
Host has (too) many features!
The major differences between this version and the ancient version which
is included in the BIND-4 and BIND-8 distributions are summarised as
follows:
-
Major overhaul of the entire code.
-
Very rigid error checking, with more verbose error messages.
-
Zone listing section completely rewritten.
-
It is now possible to do recursive listings into delegated zones.
-
Maintain resource record statistics during zone listings.
-
Maintain count of hosts during zone listings.
-
Check for various extraneous conditions during zone listings.
-
Check for illegal domain names containing invalid characters.
-
Verify that certain domain names represent canonical host names.
-
Perform TTL consistency checking during zone listings.
-
Exploit multiple server addresses if available.
-
Option to exploit only primary server for zone transfers.
-
Option to exclude info from names that do not reside in a zone.
-
Implement timeout handling during connect and read.
-
Write resource record output to optional log file.
-
Special MB tracing by recursively expanding MR and MG records.
-
Special mode to check SOA records at each nameserver for a zone.
-
Special mode to check reverse mappings of host addresses.
-
Extended syntax allows multiple arguments on command line or stdin.
-
Configurable default options in HOST_DEFAULTS environment variable.
-
Implement new resource record types from RFC 1183 and 1348.
-
Basic experimental NSAP support as defined in RFC 1637.
-
Implement new resource record types from RFC 1664 and 1712.
-
Implement new resource record types from RFC 1876 and 1886.
-
Code is extensively documented.
Included in the source distribution is a manual page documenting all the
details.
Release Information
The current release of Host is: 20070128
This release contains the following user-visible changes since the
20040117 release:
-
various updates and fixes for error, verbose, and debug
output, especially address validation (-A)
This release contains the following user-visible changes since the
20040817 release:
-
the --checkzone option now actually works.
-
canonical hostname checks are not done if the answer they are
found in doesn't have the "recursion available" flag set.
-
the logic for printing the warning when canonical hostname
checks are skipped has been corrected.
-
the way that canonical hostname checks are done has been fixed
so that only initial results from the query for A RRs are
used, avoiding a second call to gethostbyname() and thus
hopefully avoiding any confusion /etc/hosts might add to the
mess, at least on some (most?) systems.
-
a warning is now printed whenever a query requesting recursion
results in an answer without the "ra" (recursion available)
flag.
-
fix a portability problem with NetBSD 3.x and newer which
incorporated the BIND-8 resolver, but not completely, silently
leaving out the getnodeby*() functions normally privided by
this resolver API.
-
various minor updates to the default list of DNS zones used by
the rblookup script.
See the RELEASE_NOTES
file in the distribution for
information about prior releases.
This release has been successfully compiled and run by myself on at
least the following types of systems:
- NetBSD-1.6.2_STABLE/i386
- NetBSD-1.6.2_STABLE/sparc
- NetBSD-1.6.2_STABLE/alpha
- NetBSD-3_STABLE/i386
- FreeBSD-4.11-STABLE
There have also been reports of success on the following types of
systems:
Previous releases have been tested successfully on at least the
following types of systems:
- BSD/OS-1.1/i386
- NetBSD-1.3.*/i386
- NetBSD-1.3.*/sparc
- NetBSD-1.4.1/i386
- NetBSD-1.5.2/alpha
- NetBSD-1.5.2/i386
- FreeBSD-4.7
- FreeBSD-4.9-RC
- SunOS-4.1.4/sparc
- SunOS-5.6/sparc
- SunOS-5.9/sparc64
- GNU/Linux with GNU/libc 2.3 (Red-Hat 8.0)
You can always fetch the latest code itself by FTP from the master site at:
ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Planix/host.tar.gz
Prior Releases
The first release of Host that I made was an interim version I called
991529-woods-1. This version has a few minor fixes apparently
necessary for the way BIND-9 returns authoritative NS records, as well
as a feature to use the parent zone's nameservers. This version also
includes a rewritten and updated rblookup
script, as well
as a new nscheck
script to assist in verifying NS and glue
A records in parent zones. It is based on the last
host-991529
release by the late Eric
Wassenaar.
FreshMeat.net Reference
Host is listed on FreshMeat.net at
http://freshmeat.net/projects/host/
History
- Current Maintainer:
-
- Original Developer:
-
Unfortunately none of Eric Wassenaar's other network debugging tools are
available any more at
ftp://ftp.nikhef.nl/pub/network/
(*). I will continue to
make local releases of at least host
, ping
,
and vrfy
, and perhaps traceroute
, as well. In
the meant time the latest versions of each are available at:
ftp://ftp.planix.com/pub/Planix/
(*) There is however a mirror of Eric's FTP site available here:
http://www.dfred.net/public/src/nikhef_nettools/
- Contributors:
-
- Past Contributors:
-
For further information about the Host project in particular, or to
comment on this particular web page, please contact me at this address:
woods-host@planix.com
Last updated on 2012/03/12 at 14:59:26 (version 1.20).
Copyright © 2003 -
Greg A. Woods. All rights Reserved
Last modified: