Resolving Without FQDN

[Jonathan Lackey]

I have a vendor application that does not allow enough space for a Fully qualified Domain Name (FQDN). This has caused my organization to do static entries in the /etc/hosts file for years. Is there a way to use dns and not append the domain name?

E.G.
Our application is looking for a pc named comp6.

DNS resolves comp6.myorganization.com

Hosts resolves comp6 because we are not adding .myorganization.com behind it.

The application considers comp6 to be different than comp6.myorganization.com.

Can anyone help?

[TTr]

Have you tried using DNS? You can still use the short name comp6 in the application and still resolve it using DNS. Your PC must be setup to use the "myorganization.com" as the default domain (DNS client).

[Jonathan Lackey]

All of the resolution is on the UNIX box, the PCs (terminals) just point to the HPUX IP. The field in our application allows for around 12 characters in the resolved name. The DNS settings on the Unix box add the search field for our domain so that you can type in the short name. The problem is that it still returns the FQDN. Is the default domain name something that can be set on the UNIX host itself?

[TTr]

The default domain should be set in the /etc/resolv.conf file

domain myorganization.com

What does your application expect from the name resolution?
DNS will send back the FQDN and the IP address. If your app checks the name as well as the IP, the lookup will fail.

Maybe your application has a default domain somewhere in its configuration?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

DNS provided by Microsoft servers will resolve names by short name (not fdqn) if the Microsoft DNS servers are configured to do this.

This will work for systems running winbind, but can at the DNS server level be configured for all system types. You can with CIFS/9000 run winbind on your HP-UX system anyway.

There are limits to short name resolution, based on Microsoft domain name.

For simple situations though, simple /etc/hosts resolution might suffice for short names. Simply configure /etc/nsswitch.conf to look to files first
and then set up /etc/hosts

ipaddress fdqn shortname
192.168.0.10 server.example.com server

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