VoIP systems are getting us closer to your example. Properly provisioned VoIP (on-prem or cloud) can take a SIP user which looks exactly like an email address and direct digital calls to a physical phone. These days it’s likely going to be sent to an office desk phone or a Teams user, but many years from now it will likely be more common to dial out like that from/to any phone device.

I think your example is a bit more nuanced in that there’s some sort of regional database that I suppose one could register for when they change their address. But I don’t think we’re moving in that direction. Things are moving in a decentralized manner and folks hold onto their digital identities, regardless of their geographical location. So like others comments have said, the phone book system is not evolving any further, because modern communication systems are already the evolved version.

This is awesome.

The multi xxxx registration is god damned mad lad max level.

Very strange, but glad you worked it out!

I’ll keep this thread in mind if I ever run into something similar.

Well, dig is available also of course, but nearly all distros still include nslookup despite it getting deprecated. I like the simplicity of its interactive mode.

Host is also really great with more human-readable output.

Don’t get me wrong, when things are getting hairy, you’re going to make a lot of use of dig. I just find that most troubleshooting can be taken care of a lot simpler with host or nslookup.

nslookup is available on macOS and most Linux distros as well (and very helpful indeed).

Yeah if you can dig a record and received a response it’s not a routing issue.

But aren’t you on the same subnet as your DNS server? There’s no routing happening if you’re on the same subnet which I was assuming.

Even through dig defaults to outputting A records when no other options are specified, I would use the A option anyway just in case:

dig @192.168.0.249 study.lan A

If you use “ping study.lan” do you see it output the A record IP address in the first line of output?

Did you try using nslookup as I described?

How exactly are you testing this from your client, with ping? What are you using to query the DNS?

If you run nslookup from the client

• Does the ‘server’ command return the correct DNS server?
• Does <A-record>.lan return the expected record?

I’m assuming you’ve run ifconfig to verify your client’s NIC has been assigned the correct DNS via DHCP?