nslookup issues on hp-ux

[medaglia at nyctea.blackcat.com]

You're right, I did answer my own question. My head hurts so thanks for
pointing that out!!  ;-)  I guess my question now is, is there a way to
force the BIND nslookup to use the native system libraries. Dig rules for
doing lookups and troubleshooting, but I have a whole user community that
uses nslookup and expects it to check files first, then DNS. We do this
because we have customer private IP addresses in our hosts files on
specific servers. I can definitely continue using the version that came
with HP, I just wanted to use the latest and greatest from the BIND
distribution so we can stay up to date. That's why it would be cool to
have nslookup use the native routines.

Speaking of private IPs, is anyone using subdomains to address this
problem, or is it best to just keep it in the /etc/hosts files on
individual machines?

Thanks Bill and Mark for the responses!! I feel more sane now...

Chris


On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, Bill Larson wrote:

> You identified your own answer to your problem.
>
> nslookup in BIND-8 gets linked against the libbind.a and the BIND
> resolver libraries.  This is NOT the system libraries!  Any
> modification of the system libraries, by yourself or HP, will not get
> reflected in the operation of nslookup.
>
> This difference between the resolver library that nslookup uses
> compared to the library that is provided by the system CAN cause
> differences in operation.  One example is that the BIND nslookup does
> not use /etc/nsswitch.conf to determine HOW to resolve names.  On
> old Sun systems, I have seen other differences too.
>
> HP uses it's "nslookup" tool extensively in it's SAM, system
> administration tool.  Because of this, I would suggest that you do NOT
> install the BIND version of nslookup on an HP system.
>
> If you are trying to troubleshoot a DNS problem, a symple solution is
> to avoid using nslookup and move to using dig.  dig seems to operate at
> a "lower" level of the DNS protocol.  It responds more correctly to DNS
> queries, without involving system level resolver issues, such as
> /etc/nsswitch.conf.
>
> Bill Larson
>
> > Okay, now I'm really confused. I thought nslookup called resolver
> > routines, which are supposed to check /etc/nsswitch.conf. The libbind.a
> > looks like it compiles its own versions of the resolver routines, then
> > gets linked into nslookup. So it is not using the native resolver routines
> > from HP-UX, which, according to the man pages, go to nsswitch.conf to see
> > where to resolve from. Also, both texts I consulted ("DNS and BIND, 3rd
> > Ed." and "(The Concise Guide to) DNS and BIND") describe this resolver
> > behavior, that nslookup uses the resolver to find which service to use
> > (files, DNS or NIS). I'm very confused at this point and don't know what
> > to believe...
>