help - resolv.conf (on Solaris)

Jim Reid jim at mpn.cp.philips.com
Fri Sep 17 18:20:29 UTC 1999


>>>>> "Mark" == Mark A Roberts <maroberts at dial.pipex.com> writes:

    Mark> 1. Can you have both "domain" and "search" keywords in the
    Mark> resolv.conf file ?

Yes. The last one in the file will be the one that's used by the
resolver. Any previous search or domain directives will be silently
ignored.
 

    Mark>   Are there any known adverse results from doing so ?

No, but your users and applications might get confused when the
resolver doesn't look up what was expected. A resolv.conf file that
specifies both a search and a domain directive probably means that
the DNS admin was confused. And if he/she is confused....

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

No.

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

If it's the BIND8 nslookup, it's a bug. If it's Sun's nslookup, it's
probably not. Vendors tend to ship ancient versions of nslookup and
these ancient versions are known to exhibit this stupid behaviour.
Moral: always use up-to-date DNS software. The nslookup with BIND8 is
much smarter - inasmuch as anything nslookup does is smart - at
looking up names. In BIND8, any names which contain a dot in them get
looked up as is by nslookup. It only tries appending domain(s) listed
in domain/search directives if the lookup of the actual name doesn't
succeed.


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