tracert IP address strange behavior

Question

I'm not the network admin, so bear with me please.

Is there a way to find out which DNS server is responding to a TRACERT?

When we type

TRACERT 123.45.67.89  

the wrong domain name comes back:

Tracing route to domain-A.com [123.45.67.89]

It should say:

Tracing route to domain-B.com [123.45.67.89]

When we look at the DNS records of domain-B.com, they point to the correct IP address, not to 123.45.67.89. Same for domain-A. The IP addresses look correct.

How do we troubleshoot this? How do we find out where 123.45.67.89 is being incorrectly linked to domain-A?

Answer 1

tracert will give you the PTR, the reverse DNS entry for the IP, not the hostname you supplied on commandline.

So, maybe domain-A.com AND domain-B.com both resolve to 123.45.67.89 (A-Record) and the reverse DNS entry is set to domain-B.com (PTR-Record)

Answer 2

I can't tell from your question whether you are asking a question to learn or to resolve a particular problem. If the latter, then it might help to describe the problem, since it is very probable that this info, whilst maybe confusing, is irrelevant to the problem.

The name reported by a tracert is (as others have already said) the reverse dns entry (or one of the reverse dns entries) for that IP address is not related to a domain name. (For example, try pinging www.google.com and then do a tracert to that IP address and you probably won't get any mention of google)

How do we find out where 123.45.67.89 is being incorrectly linked to domain-A?

The reverse DNS entries are controlled by whoever owns the IP address. This is usually an ISP. In particular it is not controlled by whoever owns the website/mail server (etc) that happens to use that IP Address.

Also, if (as you say) the DNS records for domain-B.com do not point to 123.45.67.89, then why would you want the tracert to 123.45.67.89 to refer to domain-B.com?