≡ Menu

PowerShell: Query DNS Server for A, PTR, MX, NS and other records

This post will discuss about querying DNS Server (Microsoft or Non-Microsoft) using PowerShell for different types of records like A, PTR, MX, NS, and resource records.

Nslookup.exe is a great utility for querying DNS servers. You can connect to server and query records types that you need. Its very useful utility but only problem is it is not flexible to use inside your scripts/automations. If this utility is used inside script, you to parse the text output to extract the details you need. Ideally anything that returns results in object format is very good in programming.

Are you looking for a script to resolve host name to IP and IP to host name using PowerShell, then check this post.

Alternative to nslookup in windows world is querying DNS server using WMI. There are WMI Classes available to query DNS server for various record types. Try below command to get a list of WMI classes that helps you to query and manage DNS running on a Windows Server.

Get-WmiObject -Namespace root\MicrosoftDNS -List

The downside with approach is, it works only for querying windows based DNS servers and this approach absolutely not valid for non Microsoft DNS server like bind. You can read about using these WMI classes using PowerShell at this Hey Scripting Guy post.

This problem is addressed in much better way in Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 with the introduction of Resolve-DNSName cmdlet. Using this cmdlet you can query any kind of DNS server(Microsoft or non-MS) for any record type without requiring any extra privileges and utilities. This cmdlet returns results in object format which is easy to consume within the script.

This cmdlet is part of DNSClient module in Windows 8/Windows Server 2012 or above Operating Systems. You cannot use this module on Windows 7 or any other previous operating systems.

resolve-dnsname-intro

Now let us look at some examples to understand how to query DNS server using this.

We can query A record techibee.com using below command. This queries the DNS servers that are listed in your network connection configuration. You can get DNS Server IP details of a computer using the script provided in this post.

Resolve-DnsName -Name techibee.com -Type A

resolve-dnsname-queryASimilarly you can query Name server rescords(NS) of a Domain by passing NS as value to -Type Parameter. This lists all name servers that are hosting the Domain name you are querying. Below examples shows how to query NS records of Google.com

Resolve-DnsName -Name google.com -Type NS -DnsOnly
resolve-dnsname-queryNS

We can target these queries against any DNS server in your network. For example, we can query Google name servers directly for a record or internal DNS server for records. Below command shows how to query a DNS server directly instead of relying on what is configured in local computer network configuration.

Resolve-DnsName -Name techibee.com -Type A -Server 202.156.1.16
resolve-dnsname-queryA2

In above example, 202.156.1.16 is the IP of Google DNS server. You can try giving your internal DNS server name/IP or any external DNS name. It works same way as NSLookup does.

Similarly you can query MX records of a domain using below command.

Resolve-DnsName -Name techibee.com -Type MX -Server 202.156.1.16
resolve-dnsname-queryMX

You might be wondering what all types of records you can query using this cmdlet. Below is the list of records that this cmdlet supports.

If you have any questions about using this cmdlet, please write it in comments section.

Source : TechNet

Record Name
A_AAAA
A
AAAA
NS
MX
MD
MF
CNAME
SOA
MB
MG
MR
NULL
WKS
PTR
HINFO
MINFO
TXT
RP
AFSDB
X25
ISDN
RT
SRV
DNAME
OPT
DS
RRSIG
NSEC
DNSKEY
DHCID
NSEC3
NSEC3PARAM
ANY
ALL

Hope this helps….

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Rod October 6, 2015, 10:46 pm

    Any way to query multiple types at once? I have tried ALL and ANY but they do not seem to return all matches.

    • TechiBee October 7, 2015, 5:54 pm

      Resolve-DNSName -type All -name google.com should return all types of records that resolves google.com. What kind of records are missing?

  • Rick December 10, 2015, 1:30 am

    Is there a PowerShell command that can be run against a .txt list file that contains multiple domains in it?

    We’re just looking for the A record for the domain list.

    Output can be

  • Rung December 3, 2017, 5:12 pm

    Very good detailed article about Resolve-DNSName command. i was looking the way to export the results, that you did not mentioned. But i found my answer here: https://www.adexchangeadmin.com/resolve-dnsname-usage-powershell/

    • Wintel Rocks December 3, 2017, 5:25 pm

      Rung, thanks for the comment. yes any PowerShell output which is in object format can be exported easily to CSV using export-csv cmdlet. Not just the Resolve-DNSName output. You can use it for any other cmdlet output also.

  • Curtiss May 22, 2019, 10:30 am

    i’d like to see an example of querying a ptr record from an in-addr.arpa domain.