What is the difference between forward lookup zone and reverse lookup zone?
If you have multiple DNS records in your authoritative DNS server to a record in the DNS server of a subdomain then you need reverse lookup zone.
The forward lookup zone is when you lookup a website for a domain that actually owns that domain. It is called forward lookup because it performs a lookup and finds what IP address is associated with that site.
Example, what if I register a domain with godaddy as www.davidswanders.com. How do you perform a forward lookup to find the IP for that domain? The forward lookup zone would simply point to the Godaddy servers with www.com in there. Then it's up to you to decide if you want to get a web host or simply make use of one of the great free web hosting services out there.
In a reverse lookup zone all the information (nameservers and ip) are placed in the NS records, because there is a reverse relationship between two websites. Now I just added this on my Godaddy DNS record named davidswanders.com with nameserver (www.com) IP Address. Now if I perform a forward lookup there is no IP found, in the IP field, so it can't be found through Google.
I have a question how to create reverse lookup zone. I tried adding NS and A-records into my godaddy DNS record, but when I try to set an IP address (not a domain name) as a A-record it says "Not Found error". If I go to ReverseLookupZone.WebhostHelp.com and download the ZIP files I can still change an A-record's address into an IP address but I want to understand how do I do it exactly through GoDaddy's web site.
The difference is easy and straight forward, reverse lookups point a domain and forward lookups are to determine the IP of a domain. However, not all providers call these different things the same thing. They used to, when reverse lookups were popular. Not anymore though.
What is an example of a reverse lookup zone?
An example would be where you have an address such as: john@somerandomstuff.
Com If you do a reverse lookup on that, it will show the MX record, which in this case is. Mail.com Which translates to an email address of john@somerandomstuff.com That's a reverse lookup zone in action. Thanks for the explanation. It's good to know, I wasn't familiar with it. I guess that makes it even more useful when I need to get some email addresses from another domain.
DarylJan 7 '13 at 17:36. @Daryl I don't know that it's really any more useful than a DNS look up. The purpose of the reverse lookup is to find email addresses that are valid but don't necessarily have MX records.
LarmeJan 7 '13 at 17:45. 1
@Mike - Yes, as I've said it's not really a lookup in the sense of a DNS query. There are a number of other options for accomplishing the same thing, though.
LarmeJan 7 '13 at 17:46. 2
@Mike - The real difference is that a DNS lookup (whether a request or a query) does indeed involve communication with the authoritative DNS server (a. Root name server). The reverse lookup does not require any additional communication with the authoritative server; only a name to IP address translation is performed.
DarylJan 7 '13 at 17:48. @Daryl You're right, I forgot to mention that. I just used "lookup" because I'm used to that term, and didn't mean it in a technical sense.
Mike BrownJan 7 '13 at 18:19. 1
@MikeBrown - You're right about that, and about the root name server. But I think most people use the term in its non-technical meaning - that of looking up contact information, as in "Hey, Bob, can you get me an address for XYZ corporation?" I still don't believe that's technically correct. :)
DarylJan 7 '13 at 18:23. 2
@MikeBrown - That's why I used the non-technical usage in the original question.
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