The dates can be entered in a variety of formats. If you leave a date entry field empty, it is interpreted as "today". The range is inclusive.

When you press the "Go" button, NameSurfer will search its log for the changes made during the given date interval, and display them as a WWW form. If the interval is large, this can take a substantial amount of time and generate a WWW form of considerable size.

On the resulting form, the changes are grouped into "transactions" consisting of changes that were originally done as a single operation. Automatic updates to reverse mappings appear as transactions of their own, immediately after the transaction that affected the corresponding forward mapping.

For each transaction, NameSurfer shows:

• The name of the zone that was updated
• The account name of the user requesting the change. If the change was done using the command line interface, the word "command-line" will appear in place of the account name. For automatic updates to reverse mappings, the word "auto-reverse" will appear in place of the account name.
• The time at which the update took place
• A list of resource records added or removed, in a format similar to RFC1035 master file syntax.
• An "Undo" check button.

The changes that are made to the DNS data as a result of an undo operation are logged just like any other change. This makes it possible to undo an undo.

It may not be possible to retrieve very old log information because NameSurfer automatically discards old change log data after a configurable length of time (90 days by default).