dig and the searchlist

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:54 PM +0200 2005-09-06, Uwe Gansert wrote:

>  unfortunately the order of the parameters makes no difference here.

	Hrm.

>  I tried
>  dig +ndots=2 +search +domain=suse.de www.taylor
>  in the meantime but that does not help either.

	I was wrong about dig from BIND-8.4.6 -- it does not understand 
ndots.  I had tried passing the parameter by itself on the 
command-line, and it seemed to understand it.  But when I tried your 
complete command, it complained.  Sure enough, ndots doesn't show up 
on the list of supported parameters.  Doing a "dig -h" mentions at 
the bottom that "defname and search don't work; use fully qualified 
names".

	I tried dig from BIND-9.3.1, and while it doesn't complain about 
ndots being set and does show ndots being a supported parameter, it 
also doesn't seem to work the way that would be expected.


	Doing a bit of debugging with dig from BIND-9.3.1, even though I 
set ndots=2 on the command-line, it seems that dig is either not 
honoring that setting, or it is re-setting it back to one.  Witness:

% /usr/local/bin/dig -debug +ndots=2 +search +domain=suse.de www.taylor
main parsing +ndots=2
main parsing +search
main parsing +domain=suse.de
main parsing www.taylor
clone_lookup()
make_empty_lookup()
clone_server_list()
looking up www.taylor
setup_system()
ndots is 1.

	From that point on, the response is pretty predictable.  I don't 
know what's going on.  I don't know if this is a bug or a "feature". 
I can tell you that I don't have an explicit ndots setting in my 
resolv.conf, so I'm guessing that something else is going on.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.