DNS on PPC

[Barry Margolin]

In article <crk529$5cb$1 at sf1.isc.org>, drewha at gmail.com wrote:

> Hello
> Let me begin by saying that I'm not a network person so please be
> patient as I try to muddle through this.  I'm wondering if someone in
> the group can assist.  I've been working with Windows PPC 2002 and 2003
> and have found that although the PPC DHCP client succesfully recieves
> its DNS suffix (option 15, I think), it does not "devolve" that suffix
> in the same way that other windows platforms do.  For example if it
> recieves a suffix of .store.company.com, it will only attempt to
> resolve xxxx.store.company.com and never xxxx.company.com.  Hope this

I assume you mean that if the user types "xxxx", it will automatically 
try looking up "xxxx.store.company.com", but not "xxxx.company.com".  
But if the user explicitly types "xxxx.company.com", it works properly, 
right?

> makes sense.
> 
> My question is, is this behaviour of devolving DNS suffixes on the
> client side defined anywhere, in an RFC?  Is it part of the DNS spec?
> And if so, can anyone point me to where?

This behavior of resolvers is mostly unspecified.  Some resolvers 
require the user to specify an explicit search list, while others will 
automatically try all the parent domains of the default domain 
automatically.  This latter behavior can be problematical; suppose they 
type "yahoo", and there's no yahoo.store.company.com or 
yahoo.company.com, it will find yahoo.com rather than giving them a "No 
such host" error.

BTW, what does this have to do with BIND?  The resolver in Windows is 
Microsoft's code, not related to BIND.  If you have general DNS 
questions, they belong in comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***