What is the Dig Deep DNS Toolkit?

It is small set of simple shell scripts for DNS troubleshooting!

The explanation can't possibly get any simpler than that. DIG (Domain Information Groper) is a very convenient tool to have if you have any sort of Unix, Linux, or Cygwin environment and you do a lot of troubleshooting of domains, web hosting, or DNS. I first learned about DIG some months after I started working for HostGator as a Junior Admin (a.k.a. customer support technician) when a fellow Jr. Admin taught me about it.

I instantly took to using DIG a lot during my own troubleshooting. But DIG has a few shortcomings when used on its own: it couldn't provide all of the information that I needed in an informative and structured manner. In an effort to make my own workflow smoother and more efficient, I sought to create a simple shell script that could use DIG in a much more constructive and informative way, and thus was the genesis of my digdeep script.

Digdeep's usefulness immediately made itself apparent when I started using it at work. Several supervisors to whom I distributed found it useful on occasion as well! However, digdeep had a few shortcomings of its own. This necessity for a toolkit of scripts that each use dig in various ways to query for useful DNS information led to the creation of exactly that toolkit! Each script in the toolkit was developed whenever I needed DIG to do something different that it couldn't do on its own.

I still haven't developed an easy-installer script for this toolkit, but installation is pretty simple regardless. Just follow the step-by-step instructions and you'll have your very own DDDNS Toolkit! Make sure to also read the Codex to learn how each tool works.

Enjoy!