How To Nslookup On Mac

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If you’re a Mac user and need to troubleshoot network or server issues, you’ve probably come across the term ‘nslookup’. The nslookup command is a network administration tool for querying the Domain Name System (DNS) to obtain domain name or IP address mapping, or other DNS records.

Running the NSLookup Command

Let’s walk through how you can run an nslookup on your Mac.

  1. Open Terminal. This can be found in Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
  2. Once Terminal is open, you can type the following command:
nslookup domain.name

Replace “domain.name” with the domain you wish to look up. So, if you wanted to look up Google, you would type:

nslookup google.com

You will then see a result similar to the following:

Server:     192.168.1.1
Address:    192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:   google.com
Address: 172.217.3.174

This result tells you the server and address that was used to get the information, and the name and address of the domain you looked up. In this case, you queried the DNS for ‘google.com’ and the result was ‘172.217.3.174’.

Interpreting the Output

The output from nslookup contains some valuable information:

  • Server: This is the DNS server that your Mac used to perform the query.
  • Address: This is the IP address of the DNS server.
  • Name: This is the domain name you queried.
  • Address: This is the IP address that corresponds to the queried domain name.

It’s worth noting that DNS servers can cache their responses for a certain period. This means that if the IP address for a domain name changes, you may not see it in the nslookup results until the cache expires on your DNS server.

Conclusion

The nslookup command is an essential tool for diagnosing network issues and gathering information about domain names. While this guide has covered basic use of the nslookup command, it has many other features and options that you can use to adjust its output or query different types of DNS records.