cpj@sun.com (Chuck Jerian) (01/28/89)
The following revised documentation is proposed for the relevant section of the Sunos manual. __________ Inter-Domain Naming YP is used only for naming within a single domain. If you need to do naming across domain boundaries, then another mechanism is used, called the Domain Name System. The Domain Name System is implemented in two parts: the server side is the name daemon in.named, and the client side is called the resolver. The first step is to set up the server so that other people use names in your domain. Your server must be registered with some higher authority, such as the Internet Network Information Center. Chapter 22, "Name Server Operations," explains how to register and set up the server. Note that only "visible" domains need to be registered. For example, if your YP domain name is "hq.Widget.COM" then "Widget.COM" is the domain that should be registered within the ".COM" domain. To use the resolver so that you can reference names in domains outside of yours, edit the /var/yp/Makefile to include the "-b" option on makedbm for the hosts.byname and hosts.byaddr maps. When the next set of maps get propagated to the YP servers, they will then try to look up names using the domain name system resolver if they are not found in the hosts YP maps. Each YP server must therefore have either a valid /etc/resolv.conf file set up to point to at least one machine running a name server (see manual page for resolv.conf(5)), or else it must be running in.named itself (perhaps in caching-only mode, see Chapter 22). This mechanism has the advantage that all YP clients (including those running old releases such as SunOS 3.x) can autmatically use inter-domain names. However, since YP clients normally try forever to get a response, termporary failures can cause programs to seem to hang until they are manually interrupted. Alternatives are to either link selected programs directly with the resolver library (such as the /usr/lib/sendmail.mx), or install a shared library with the YP gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr routines replaced with the resolver versions. __________ Running named in Australia: Because of the idosyncracies of (or bugs in) BIND (in.named) its best to create a fake primary root domain if you are NOT connected to a real internet. Suppose your machine is lost.ac.nowhere.oz., and its internet address is 133.1.1.1 /etc/named.boot needs the following line added primary . /wherever/bogus_root.db /wherever/bogus_root.db in the appropriate place needs a file like the following: . IN SOA lost.ac.nowhere.oz. postmaster.lost.ac.nowhere.oz ( 1.1 ; serial - database version number 1800 ; refresh - sec servers 300 ; retry - for refresh 3600 ; expire - unrefreshed data 7200 ) ; min . IN NS lost.ac.nowhere.oz. lost.nowhere.oz. IN A 133.1.1.1 1.1.1.133.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR lost.ac.nowhere.oz. You also should change /etc/resolv.conf to add a line like domain ac.nowhere.oz This causes searches for the resolver to use ac.nowhere.oz and then nowhere.oz in its search. E.g. if you give it smarzl.east to lookup it will try smarzl.east.ac.nowhere.oz and then smarzl.east.nowhere.oz and then smarzl.east. I don't think it tries smarzl.east.oz for some reason or the other.