utility that walks through hostname lookup? (free alt toDNSStuff.com?)

DNSStuff.com has a tool called DNSReport that automatically walks
through all the steps of looking up a hostname, and if something goes
wrong, tells you exactly where it's going wrong -- e.g. www.peacefire.org
is not resolving, so DNSReport determined that ns1.65537.net and
ns2.65537.net were the responsible nameservers, but that neither of
them was resolving the hostname www.peacefire.org.

The problem is that DNSStuff.com is now charging $80/year for
DNSReport. Are there any online utilities that do the same thing but
are still free?

(I do know how to do the steps above by hand, but it was convenient to
have a tool that did it all automatically and told you exactly what
was going wrong.)

-Bennett

Bennett Haselton <bennett@peacefire.org> wrote:
> DNSStuff.com has a tool called DNSReport that automatically walks
> through all the steps of looking up a hostname, and if something goes
> wrong, tells you exactly where it's going wrong [...]

> The problem is that DNSStuff.com is now charging $80/year for
> DNSReport. Are there any online utilities that do the same thing but
> are still free?

I don't know about online utilities (have you tried spade?), but isn't
this something that dnstracer or dnswalk could do for you?

$ dnstracer -4 www.peacefire.org
Tracing to www.peacefire.org[a] via 127.0.0.1, maximum of 3 retries
127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1)
|\___ TLD2.ULTRADNS.NET [org] (204.74.113.1)
| |\___ ns1.65537.net [peacefire.org] (69.72.159.12) Got auth ans
| \___ ns2.65537.net [peacefire.org] (65.98.98.152) Got auth ans
|\___ D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org [org] (2001:0500:000f:::::0001) Not queried
|\___ D0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.org [org] (199.19.57.1)
| |\___ ns2.65537.net [peacefire.org] (65.98.98.152) Got auth ans
| \___ ns1.65537.net [peacefire.org] (69.72.159.12) Got auth ans
|\___ C0.ORG.AFILIAS-NST.INFO [org]
[...]

$ dnswalk -r peacefire.org.
Checking peacefire.org.
Getting zone transfer of peacefire.org. from ns1.65537.net...failed
FAIL: Zone transfer of peacefire.org. from ns1.65537.net failed:
Response code from server: REFUSED
Getting zone transfer of peacefire.org. from ns2.65537.net...done.
SOA=ns1.65535.net contact=rghf.65535.net
WARN: peacefire.org MX backupmx.65537.net: unknown host
WARN: banner.peacefire.org A 65.98.31.174: no PTR record
1 failures, 2 warnings, 0 errors.

Uh, why does ns1 refuse a zone transfer request but ns2 honours it?

Regards,
Chris