In my first experience with sockets in perl, I've written my DNS client utility for CGI, which I've named "DNS Crawler". A heck of a lot of help information and functionality was included into the script. Since it does not yet support zone transfers, it is not released. But first I want all kinds of people to "crawl" all over the dns system looking for bugs or improvements that can be made.

Here's some of the things I want you to look for:

1) Broken links
2) Help links that returns a "no definition" message
3) improvements in style that may be made, such as colors and layout.
4) If you don't understand something and there's no help available for it.
5) suggestions to make things more convenient, or smooth, or professional.
6) mispelled words or bad case, or hard-to-read fonts.
7) obvious bugs such as crashes
8) strange error messages that may be better written

here's the link

http://serialcoders.sytes.net/cgi-bin/DNS/index.pl

It is suggested that you read all help references on the initial page before submitting queries.

Looks good SR. I be sure to play with it l8r

Hey SR

I just clicked on the link given above, and instead of the IP address that was there by deafult, i removed that and wrotte: albakiss.com
then i clicked SEND QUERTY.. and this is what i got:

Recieve Error: Unknown error

Thank you very much for your report! I was beginning to think everybody was either gonna test out the script and say nothing, or ignore it.

I did some sniffing to see why. The script sent the UDP packet to the server. Then a ICMP packet was sent back in response to tell me that the port is unavailable. However, the script interpreted the ICMP as incoming data, but it failed to retrieve any data cause there wasn't any. And since I'm finding out that perl's socket error descriptions are gay, all it said was "Unknown Error" in reference to the "Recieve" action that took place.

So now I changed it so that when it fails to read UDP data, it assumes it is an invalid dns server. It will now say this:

"The 'Server' field is not a valid DNS server"

(btw, whoever has been sending OMV requests on the dns tool, please speak up. I want to talk to you.)

Ok, I've seen a lot of people misunderstand what the SERVER field and the NAME fields are in the program. I repeat, and emphasize STRONGLY that you read the help on the initial page! Just click on a topic to learn. Most words are linked and defined.

hah! even if nobody says anything perhaps I can get SOME help from people's experimentations. It was kinda amusing, some poor chap very obediently read the help for 'server' and 'name' and STILL didn't send his query right. I've modified the help information for those 2 terms to make things more clear on how to use them.

Don't worry, I plan on making a newbified submit form to make sending queries less confusing.

Np SR, i really hope you'll get that DNS crawler working perfect and then releasse it to the public, i like your work as always !!

Now about my case above, the unavilable port thing.. is that port supposed to be port 52 ?

Btw, what's OMV, like i never heard that before or maybe i'm just confused ? Could you please explain SR ?

P.S. Btw the HELP sections are very helpfull for those anybody who needs help around the script.

the port is supposed to be 53, and that's the only port the utility allows you to use. What you did wrong was put a domain in the DNS server field that wasn't a DNS server.

The 'OMV' comment was not directed at you, so don't worry about it.

Yeah i understand you about the DNS server, i was aware of that, just wanted to test...

I know that the OMV comment wasn't directed at me coz i didn't send anything like that but i wanted to know what it is if you can ...

A person uses a domain that ends with 'OMV.com' for his internet connection. He also sent queries relating to the OMV domain. There's also the website 'www.omv.com' which is incredibly professional, and bears many different language versions - not sure what it's for though. Due to his know-how in querying his own domain, I wanted to talk to him. Happy nosey?

yup, SR !!

Coz i thought it was somekinda packet/data or something.. but anyway, i got it now.

bp