I'm not the networking guru... nor even a programming guru for that matter, but I have to pass as one here... so forgive my ignorance. Pointers are appreciated, too.

I need to write a script to test that a local DNS is working and not be fooled by its cache. I went to CPAN and found a bunch of packages related to DNS and all of them are quite involved, so a little guidence would be appreciated.

This DNS is on a dedicated machine that provides its service to the cell phones on our data core. We occasionally run into a situation where the server thinks it is running just fine, but it's lost it's lookup table... so we don't get any warning or alarms until the CSRs start getting complaints.

The idea is to set up an hourly script to basically, do an nslookup and alarm us if it fails. But the problem is nslookup gives cached information and we lose the length of the cache age as a buffer to customer service. Is there a good way to do this?

Again, please forgive my ignorance and point me at any information you think I should have... just remember, while I'm interested in learning new things, I have to balance that with other time contraints :)

--Jimbus aka Jim Babcock
Wireless Data Engineer and Geek Wannabe
jim-dot-babcock-at-usa-dot-com

In reply to testing a DNS server by jimbus

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