As I mentioned in last week’s post, “PowerShell v2 and DNS Queries…“, it is much easier to do scripted DNS queries in PowerShell v3 than it is in v2 — thanks to the new Resolve-DnsName command.  Following along the same lines as the previous post, and using the exact same example hosts, we can show the same correlations and results for comparison. 

We’ll start off with a request similar to our first nslookup in the previous post, but this time using the Resolve-DnsName command:

And as before, the same holds true with out multi-valued results:

On its face, the results are very similar to nslookup results.  However, since we’re dealing with objects here instead of scraped screen executable output, we can actually manage our results very neatly.  Here’s what I mean, as I enclose the object, and only request the “.IpAddress” from it for my two example hosts:

See how neat, clean, and powerful that is?  This same thing works with other object elements, like “.NameHost“, and such.  By the way, I’ve seen some advice posts out on the ‘Net that advise you to use an increment indicator like this:

(Resolve-DnsName $server_name)[0].IpAddress

…but that will cause you to only get the first result returned!  And sometimes, that may be what you’re after; but in the case of the multivalued host, that’s probably not what you want.

Now, to contrast last week’s post, I’ll show you how we take the 12-line PowerShell v2 script down to a 3-line PowerShell v3 script:

$ARecord = "labdc1.lab.local"
$NameServerQueried = "192.168.6.4"
(Resolve-DnsName -Name $ARecord -Type A -Server $NameServerQueried -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue).IpAddress

 …But of course, it’s only 3 lines because 2 of them are variables; but it’s a fully functional equivalent.  And you can start to see how efficient it can be when looped.  And for the sake of completion of the comparison, here’s the results of my v3 script with the “fakehost” multi-valued host:

…and with the original “labdc1″:

So there you have it.  We love the new commands in PowerShell v3, and they are making our lives soooo much easier (once you know about them).   Now, I’m just waiting for the commands I’ve been asking for… Like Get-MyCoffee… and Get-WorldPeace…. and Solve-GlobalHunger…

Tags: DNS, nslookup, Powershell, PowerShellv2, PowerShellv3, script

For this week’s (and next week’s) post, I decided I’d kill a few birds with one stone.  Since it’s “PowerShell month” here at TekTopics.com, and since I’m still making my way through all the differences between PowerShell v2 and v3 (like we all are), I thought I’d tell you about how I just discovered how a relatively simple thing was relatively hard to do in PowerShell v2, and how it got relatively WAY easier in PowerShell v3:  DNS lookups.

Probably like you, I’ve been doing DNS queries for years in all kinds of scripts and languages — like bash, perl, DOS batch files, and of course, PowerShell.  And up until recently, I treated them all pretty much the same — in that I typically just made a system call out to running OS and used the native DNS client query tool, nslookup.  Of course this requires that I grab the output of the tool, scrape out just the information I want (and ignore other data), and continue on to make use of it.

However, in PowerShell v2, the problem is that when trying to grab the desired results back from the system call, the resulting address from the query is not as easy to discern from the “courtesy” information that is returned along with the answer from nslookup.  What I mean is that searching for the string “Address” could get you in trouble, since you end up with two lines that start with “Address” — the one you don’t want (the address of the server that was queried), and the one you want (the query response). 

And in some cases, they could theoretically be the same value, especially if you’re looping through a list of nameservers and query the name of the server you’re querying.  See what I mean in this unfiltered example query and response: 

Note that the record could be multi-valued too, like this example:

So if I just attempt to grab all the strings that match “Address”, as in the following…:

…I could end up with some strange results.  So, instead, I search for all strings in the form of an IP address, and I implement a simple counter to skip the first one, catch any subsequent ones, and split the result to strip out the words.  Here’s the code for my loop:

$ARecord = "fakehost.lab.local"
$NameServerQueried = "192.168.6.4"
$FullAddressList = nslookup -type=a $ARecord $NameServerQueried | findstr "[0-9].[0-9].[0-9].[0-9]" 
$counter = 0
foreach ($line in $FullAddressList)
{
  $counter = $counter + 1
  if ($counter -ne 1)
  {
    write "$line" | %{ $_.Split(" ")[2] }
  }
}

…and here are the results, with the query for the multi-valued “fakehost” host record, as in the $ARecord variable as above (inside my Example.ps1 script):

…and with the original “labdc1″ nameserver query, as in my first example:

As you can see, DNS queries are do-able in PowerShell v2, but it’s a pain.  The little snippet above should work just fine inside of a larger loop in a validation script, or on its own, for whatever you need to get done.  And I’m sure there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, but this has worked for me in the past (and present) in PowerShell v2. 

Well — now, there’s a new way of getting the same queries done in PowerShell v3, that is much, much, much easier…  And I will jump into that next week.  See you then!

Next week:   The PowerShell v3 way!

Tags: DNS, nslookup, Powershell, PowerShellv2, PowerShellv3, script