How can I test a new nameserver before updating the registrar records?
amazon-route53, dns, nameservers
Solution
If you're on a *nix system, you should be able to use either `nslookup` or `dig`. With both of those commands you can specify what server you would like to query. Simply use your new nameserver as the server. With `dig`, the query would look something like
dig @<your-nameserver> <hostname-to-look-up>
So, if you wanted to query google's public dns server and ask it about the address www.google.com, you'd use
dig @8.8.8.8 www.google.com
which, amongst other things, would tell you that www.google.com is an alias for www.l.google.com -- and then would give you a bunch of IP address (A records) for that name.
Problem
I have configured a set of DNS records at a new DNS provider. The configuration is complex, with load-balancing, SSL, etc, there are things that could go wrong. I want to test this configuration before changing the namespace records at registrar. - Is there any way to locally provide my machine with the new nameserver for the domain? - Are there any tools that might help with this? Please note: I don't want to just update the A records (e.g. in `/etc/hosts`) - I want to specifically check the nameserver is returning the A and CNAME records.