OT question about dns

[D Hill]

On Mon, 7 Apr 2008 at 18:05 -0500, pauls at utdallas.edu confabulated:

> Does anyone know how to use dig or some other tool to query for TXT records 
> in DNS?
>
> I'm working on implementing spf on a small domain that I maintain, and it 
> doesn't seem to be working (according to the validators I'm using.)  I'd like 
> to be able to query the dns server myself, but I can't seem to find anything 
> on how to extract or view TXT records for a domain.
>
> I tried dig @server domain TXT and dig @server domain MX, but I don't get the 
> TXT record.

%dig @what_ever_nameserver example.com txt

works for me. Let's see what AOL returns:

%dig @localhost aol.com txt
...
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;aol.com.                       IN      TXT

;; ANSWER SECTION:
aol.com.                300     IN      TXT     "v=spf1 
ip4:152.163.225.0/24 ip4:205.188.139.0/24 ip4:205.188.144.0/24 
ip4:205.188.156.0/23 ip4:205.188.159.0/24 ip4:64.12.136.0/23 
ip4:64.12.138.0/24 ip4:64.12.143.99/32 ip4:64.12.143.100/32 
ip4:64.12.143.101/32 ptr:mx.aol.com ?all"
aol.com.                300     IN      TXT     "spf2.0/pra 
ip4:152.163.225.0/24 ip4:205.188.139.0/24 ip4:205.188.144.0/24 
ip4:205.188.156.0/23 ip4:205.188.159.0/24 ip4:64.12.136.0/23 
ip4:64.12.138.0/24 ip4:64.12.143.99/32 ip4:64.12.143.100/32 
ip4:64.12.143.101/32 ptr:mx.aol.com ?all"