Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 3 91

Conﬁguring and Administering the BIND Name Service

Conﬁguring the Resolver to Query a Remote Name Server

Conﬁguring the Resolver to Query a

Remote Name Server

Follow these steps if you want your host to query a name server on a

remote host:

1. Create a ﬁle on your host called /etc/resolv.conf. The

/etc/resolv.conf ﬁle has three conﬁguration options:

• domain followed by the default domain name. The domain entry

is needed only when the local system’s host name (as returned by

the hostname command) is not a domain name, and the search

option is not conﬁgured.

• search followed by up to six domains separated by spaces or tabs.

The ﬁrst domain in the search list must be the local domain. The

resolver will append these domains, one at a time, to a host name

that does not end in a dot, when it constructs queries to send to a

name server. The domain and search keywords are mutually

exclusive.

If you do not specify the search option, the default search list will

contain only the local domain.

• nameserver followed by the internet address (in dot notation) of a

name server that the resolver should query. You can conﬁgure up

to three nameserver entries.

The following is an example of /etc/resolv.conf:

search cs.Berkeley.Edu Berkeley.Edu

nameserver 132.22.0.4

nameserver 132.22.0.12

2. If you did not specify the local domain with the search or domain

option, set the default domain name with the hostname command, as

in the following example,

/usr/bin/hostname indigo.div.inc.com

and set the HOSTNAME variable in the /etc/rc.config.d/netconf

ﬁle to the same value, as in the following example:

HOSTNAME=indigo.div.inc.com