DNS

[Satish Y]

Hi Experts,

Do anybody know what is relative resolution and how can we configure DNS to use relative resolution?.... I mean what r all the files we need to modify?....

Thanks in adveance...

Cheers...
Satish.

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Satish,

If you just want to use your system to resolve ip and hostname through DNS Server then you need to modify the following files.
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/resolv.conf

/etc/nsswitch.conf
hosts DNS [NOTFOUND=continue] files

/etc/resolv.conf
search a.b.c # a.b.c ==Domain Name
nameserver a.b.c.d
nameserver p.q.r.s # a.b.c.d & p.q.r.s = DNS Server IP

Have a look at the HP Manual,
Installing and Administering Internet Services (HP Part No. B2355-90110). Look for Configuring and Administering the BIND Name Service -->Configuring the Resolver to query a remote name server.

you can download this manual from HP doc website docs.hp.com

Hope this helps

thanks

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Satish,

Here is the link to the manual i was talking about.

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/B2355-90685/B2355-90685.html

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/pdf/B2355-90685.pdf

Hope this helps.

Thanks

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Satish,

You don't need to modify any configuration for relative resolution. That is in effect by default. The absolute resolution comes into picture where you don't want to append the domain name to the hostname.

For ex., if the domain is defined as yourdomain.com in /etc/resolv.conf and if you put a host entry as

xx.xx.xx.xx tiger.

Then the domain will not be appended to tiger

However relative resolution is by default where you don't specify the trailing ".".

xx.xx.xx.xx tiger

Here the domain name will be appended to tiger ike tiger.yourdomain.com

So, sometimes if the DNS is not configured properly, sendmail complains saying that "unable to qualify my own domain". In this case, you can overcome by keeping a trailing dot at the end of the hostname in your hosts file.

Everything is dependent on the order lookup works as set in nsswitch.conf. Usually you don't need to keep "." in your system. This is applicable most of the times in the DNS Server config files.


-Sri