CCST Cybersecurity Practice Test

When diagnosing name resolution problems, you want a tool that talks directly to DNS servers to ask for specific records. That’s what nslookup does. It’s a command-line utility built to query DNS servers and retrieve resource records, such as A records (mapping a domain to an IP), MX records (mail servers), NS records (name servers), CNAMEs, and more. You can run it simply to see what IP address a domain resolves to, or specify the record type to verify particular DNS data, for example asking for MX records for a domain or pointing nslookup at a specific DNS server to compare results. This targeted capability makes it the go-to tool for DNS troubleshooting and validation. Tools like netstat focus on current network connections, not DNS data; grep is a text-search utility; and route deals with routing tables. None of those directly retrieve DNS resource records to diagnose name resolution.