Stupid question about DNS

Joseph S D Yao jsdy at cospo.osis.gov
Thu Jan 27 23:10:38 UTC 2000


On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 10:18:07PM +0100, Attico Nicola wrote:
> hello everybody,
> I'm running Red Hat 5.2 on the computer in my office
> and I was trying to understand how DNS works exactly.
> So, I was quite surprised when I couldn't see some
> daemon like named with the ps command. I also was not
> able to find binary files and configuration files
> I expected. On another computer, always with Red Hat 5.2
> i saw with ps a process called (dns-resolver) that I
> suppose to be my resolver, but on my PC nothing of that...
> but DNS works correctly. So I suspect I'm doing some
> stupid error. Why I've not something like named.conf?
> Thanks in advance,
> Nicola

Even though most systems are installed with 'named', most don't run it
or need to run it.  If you are not running a name server on your
system, then of course you won't need /etc/named.conf or any of the
configuration files.

But every system that uses DNS needs to resolve queries through some
name server.  Your name servers are listed in file /etc/resolv.conf.
Programs that need to use DNS have the resolver routines compiled into
them, and it is the programs themselves [using these routines] that
open this file, find out which name servers they should be using, and
try to contact them.  The first one that they can contact is considered
[at least by that process] to be THE name server from which it will get
all of its information.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
COSPO/OSIS Computer Support					EMT-B
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