HP-UX IP Address and Client Management Administrator's Guide HP-UX 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3

For more information, type man 1 rndc-confgen at the command prompt.
Benefits of Using BIND
Table 1-2 explains the advantages of BIND over other name services available on the HP-UX
operating system (NIS and the /etc/hosts file).
Table 1-2 Advantages of Using BIND over Other Name Services
DisadvantageAdvantage
If you use the /etc/hosts file or the NIS hosts
database to resolve host name, you must explicitly
configure every host you might need to contact.
You can store information for the hosts only in your local
domain. In your local domain, you need to configure only the
hosts in your own domain and the addresses of name servers
in other domains. When your name server fails to resolve a host
name from its local database, it can contact these other name
servers to resolve the host names.
If you use the /etc/hosts file for host name
resolution, you must keep an up-to-date copy of the
file on every host in your domain. If you use NIS,
you must ensure that your NIS slave servers receive
regular updates from the master server.
You can store all the host information on one host. You can
configure only one machine as a name server, and all other
machines query the name server. Information must be
up-to-date on only one host instead of many.
A NIS server can serve only the hosts on its local
LAN. NIS clients send out broadcasts to locate and
bind to NIS servers, and broadcasts do not cross
network boundaries. Each NIS server is able to
answer all the host name queries from the hosts on
its local LAN. Because the /etc/hosts file contains
only a few host names, it is nearly impossible to
contact every host on the Internet.
You can contact almost any host on the Internet. Because BIND
spans network boundaries, you can locate almost any host on
the network by starting at the root server and working down.
BIND is used mostly for host information, and NIS is used for other configuration information,
like the passwd and group databases. The only advantage that NIS has over BIND is that NIS
can easily manage many different types of information otherwise must be maintained separately
on each host. However, NIS does not easily span networks, so the hosts in an NIS domain do
not have access to information on other domains.
BIND Configuration File
The BIND configuration file, /etc/named.conf, enables you to specify a number of different
features using statements and comments. Each statement in the configuration file ends with a
semicolon. Many statements contain a block of substatements, which also end with a semicolon.
You can give comments using the C syntax (with /* and */), the C++ syntax (where // starts the
comment), and the shell syntax (where # starts the comment).
IMPORTANT: A detailed understanding of the BIND configuration file statements discussed
in this section is a prerequisite for configuring the master, slave or caching-only server.
The utility hosts_to_named runs the named-bootconf.pl Perl script to generate the master
and slave servers’ configuration files using the /etc/hosts file as input. The
named-bootconf.pl script sets the check-names directives by default in the options
statement to enforce proper handling of non-standard host names that do not comply with RFC
952 (DoD Internet host table specification), for example, names with underscore ‘_’ characters
and other non-alphanumeric characters.
To generate the configuration file for the domain div.inc.com and network 15.19.8, issue
the following command:
# hosts_to_named
-d div.inc.com -n 15.19.8
24 Overview