Meaning of the five fields of the ANSWER SECTION in dig query

user3051464 picture user3051464 · Nov 30, 2013 · Viewed 23.5k times · Source

Here is the ANSWER SECTION when I run dig www.google.com:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com.         108     IN      A       74.125.239.115
www.google.com.         108     IN      A       74.125.239.114
www.google.com.         108     IN      A       74.125.239.116
www.google.com.         108     IN      A       74.125.239.113
www.google.com.         108     IN      A       74.125.239.112

I think the first field contains the URL and the second field contains the port number. I am not sure about the third and fourth fields. I think the fifth field contains the IP address.

I've reviewed http://www.madboa.com/geek/dig/ and https://kb.mediatemple.net/questions/909/Understanding+the+dig+command, and am still unsure what each section represents.

Answer

Vliu picture Vliu · Dec 1, 2013

Reference: http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch15/#answer and http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch8/a.html

The first field is the NAME: The domain name being returned

The second field (108 in your example) is the TTL in seconds.

IN is the CLASS. Here, IN stands for Internet.

A is the TYPE. Here, A stands for mapping a domain name to an IPv4 address.

The last field is of course the IP Address.