When you type a website on your browser for the first time, your computer has no reference to it. However, your next visit to the same restaurant will be faster if you save the address. If you only have access to the phone book, it might take you longer to get the right address. Imagine that a friend asked you to meet at a restaurant you’ve never been to. But, you can resolve such problems by clearing your DNS cache.

However, you may start experiencing connectivity issues if the local DNS cache becomes outdated or corrupted.Ī number of things can corrupt the local DNS cache, including viruses and network attacks. Since caching keeps the IP addresses you’ve queried, your load time is significantly faster. So, instead of rerouting your queries to DNS servers, the system answers them. In DNS caching, your browser or Operating System captures IP addresses you’ve visited recently and saves them in a database. Think of the DNS as a phone book or directory that indexes websites and their IP addresses. At the bottom, the query was performed using google DNS which we have configured on our Mac network connection.Windows, Mac OS, and Linux use Domain Name Servers (DNS) cache to save name resolution information. We see a list of all associated records for. Type the following command into Terminal. We will use –a to find out all records associated with. m set memory debugging flag (trace|record|usage)ģ. W specifies how long to wait for a reply R specifies number of retries for UDP packets N changes the number of dots allowed before root lookup is done l lists all hosts in a domain, using AXFR C compares SOA records on authoritative nameservers To get a list of host commands type host –help Open Terminal (Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal)Ģ. This is useful if you want to know certain information about a website or domain including geolocation of website hosted, check for email mx records, and validating a domain SPF record.ġ. You can use Terminalin Mac to lookup any and all associated host recordsfor any domain name on the Internet.

Mac terminal commands display dns