Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?
more info: http://www.tty1.net/blog/2010/ifconfig-ip-comparison_en.html
Then I worked for an arbitrage desk at an investment bank. They used virtual addresses for different IPs, on top of vlans connected to different exchanges, redundantly (ie bonded).
Not a single IP-having interface appeared using ifconfig.
NOTE
This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ifconfig
Pedantry, but keep in mind that there isn't really "the" man page for this.
Ubuntu might want to deprecate ifconfig, but that doesn't mean everyone does.
And dnsip/dnsipq/dnsmx/dnsname/dnstxt: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tools.html
What the original post most likely referred to is to use ip instead of ifconfig, and to use dig instead of nslookup.
The Linux way isn't always the way the rest of Unix is going. In fact, most of our current OS's are a hodgepodge of different great things developed by different teams - for example, rsync from the Samba devs, sudo from OpenBSD, git from Linux, etc.
This is one of the great things about Unix is that it's a big sandbox to play in. The entire "lets replace init" movement from the last 10 years is pretty fascinating in it's own right. Spend some time looking at how the other crowds out there are doing things - you might find something interesting and helpful.