fausett@radc.af.mil (Mark L. Fausett) (06/29/89)
HELP! I have a name server which seems to be working properly, but doesn't interface well with nslookup -- % nslookup *** Can't find server name for address 127.0.0.1: No information *** Default servers are not availible % other machines using a resolv.conf pointing at this machine get a similar error. BUT -- I can kludge the system by doing something like this: % nslookup -l <some weird hostname here> which eventually reports a timeout and connects to my local server! while this nslookup is working, other machines pointing at this machine can use the server too! WHAT IS GOING ON? PLEASE SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME! Mark Fausett fausett@ra.radc.af.mil fausett@tops20.radc.af.mil (this one's in the host tables)
steve@umiacs.umd.edu (10/06/89)
The domain name searching you're seeing was done deliberately, and is (for most people) a feature rather than a bug. People with sources generally hack the resolver library sources to turn off the RES_DEFNAMES and/or RES_SEARCH flags in the _res structure in res_init.c, then recompile... but you probably can't do that. The searching goes only up to two domains away from the root. (For us, that means that we'll look for 'foo' in foo.cs.umd.edu and foo.umd.edu, but not foo.edu.) The one case where this is legimately a problem is when the second-level domain is served not by something local, but by (say) the root servers. Many of the military domains (i.e., navy.mil) are set up this way. I suppose it would be nice to have a way to turn off searching and default names on a system-wide basis. I'd still like to see the searching be made a bit more flexible in the BIND resolver, but it seems unlikely (for moderately good reasons) that such a change will never be put in by Berkeley. About MX sendmails: I think there is a fixed one out on uunet, probably as sendmail.mx. You might (if you don't mind losing the Sun sendmail YP support) just choose to grab a copy of sendmail 5.61 from ucbarpa.berkeley.edu instead, and use that over the Sun sendmail. -Steve Spoken: Steve Miller Domain: steve@umiacs.umd.edu UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve Phone: +1-301-454-1808 USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742