Treanglin, I know exactly what you meant. DNSstuff used to be all free
and I recall doing a couple of lookups there like you're describing.

Try 'dig'. It's a Unix lookup utility. I know it's part of BSD, not sure about
Linux.

http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_dig.htm

Here's a 'howto':

http://freebsdhowtos.com/62.html

HTH.