help - resolv.conf (on Solaris)

Barry Margolin barmar at bbnplanet.com
Fri Sep 17 17:36:36 UTC 1999


In article <37E2665F.D9F02117 at dial.pipex.com>,
Mark A Roberts  <maroberts at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
>I have the following questions regarding DNS and resolv.conf. As you may
>guess I'm a bit of a novice at DNS setup....
>
>Please post replies direct to sender....
>
>1. Can you have both "domain" and "search" keywords in the resolv.conf
>file ?
>   Are there any known adverse results from doing so ? 
>   [domain followed by search - the man page seems to suggest only the
>last will be used ]

The DNS & BIND book does more than "suggest" this, it says it outright: "If
you use both in resolv.conf, the one that appears last will override the
other." (3rd edition, p.105).

>   Is there any difference between "domain" and "search" with just one
>entry ?

Not with a modern version of the BIND resolver.  With the BIND 4.8.3
resolver, "domain a.b.c.d" was equivalent to "search a.b.c.d b.c.d c.d" --
it would try the specified domain and all its parent domains (except the
top-level domain).

>2. I performed a name search on a Solaris 2.5.1 machine and a Solaris
>2.6 machine. The former appeared to do go through the "search" list even
>when given a FQDN. Is this a (known) bug or problem, or have I screwed
>up somewhere ?

This was a bug in older resolvers; they used the search list even for names
that had dots.  See RFC 1535.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.


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