HP-UX IP Address and Client Management Administrator's Guide (October 2009)

If your organization belongs to several networks, register your domain with only one
of them.
• If your organization is not connected to a network, you can set up domains without
registering them. However, HP recommends that you follow the Internet naming
conventions in case you later decide to join a public network.
2. Next, you must decide a name for your domain using the following guidelines:
• Use only letters (A-Z), digits (0-9), and hyphens (-) for the domain name. Domain names
do not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Avoid labels longer than 12 characters. (A label is a single component of a fully qualified
name, like indigo or com.)
• If a host connects to more than one network, it must have the same name on each
network.
• Do not use nic or other well-known acronyms as the leftmost (most specific) label in
a domain name. Contact Government Systems, Inc., for a list of top-level and second-level
domain names already in use.
3. After you have registered your domain, you can create subdomains without registering
them with the public network.
Configuring the Name Service Switch
The Name Service Switch determines where your system looks for host information to resolve
a host name to an IP address.
For all types of information except host information, you can configure your system to use NIS
(one of the NFS Services) or the local /etc file, in any order. HP recommends not to configure
your system to use NIS.
For host information, you can configure your system to use BIND (DNS), NIS, or the /etc/hosts
file. As mentioned earlier, HP recommends not to configure your system to use both NIS.
See HP-UX Internet Services Administrator’s Guide at the URL http://www.docs.hp.com/
hpux/netcom/index.html#Internet%20Services for more information on the Name
Service Switch.
Choosing Name Servers for Your Domain
You can configure your host as any of the following types of BIND name servers:
• Master Server
A master server is the authority for its domain and contains data corresponding to its domain.
The master server obtains its information from a master file on the disk. On previous versions
of BIND, the master server was referred to as a primary server.
• Slave Server
A slave server is also the authority for its domain and contains the domain’s data, but it
receives data over a network from another master server. On previous versions of BIND,
the slave server was referred to as a secondary server.
• Caching-Only Server
A caching-only server is not authoritative for any domain. The only function that a
caching-only server performs is to look up data from an authoritative server and store the
data in its cache.
• Forwarding Server
A forwarding server always forwards queries that it cannot satisfy from its authoritative
data or cache to a fixed list of other servers. A forwarding server is typically used when you
do not want all the servers at a given site to interact with the rest of the Internet servers. An
64 Configuring and Administering the BIND Name Service