RS6000 named

[Russell A. Heise]

 leclair at chamois.cs.uiowa.edu (Jeanne Leclair) writes:

 > I recently started bringing up a 530 RS6000 and want to run named.  I set up
 > named.boot, loopback.rev and root.cache like on our other machines running
 > named and fired it up.  It works great for machines local to our departmental
 > domain (cs.uiowa.edu).  You can specify just the hostname or the fully-qual-
 > ified name and it works.  It also works fine for off-campus hosts for which
 > you would expect to have to specify the fuly-qualified name.  For on-campus
 > hosts in other departments, however, you would expect to be able to use
 > hostname.dept-domain and that doesn't work.  Only fully-qualified names work
 > for everything outside cs.uiowa.edu.  What did I miss i the setup or is this
 > how it's supposed to work?

 You missed nothing; yes, this is how it's supposed to work.  I assume you
 have set up an appropriate /etc/resolv.conf.  If so, AIX follows a two-step
 process to resolve a name to an address.  (1) First, AIX looks at the name
 passed *to* it.  If the name has a period (.) anywhere in it, AIX leaves it
 untouched.  Otherwise, AIX appends the domain string from /etc/resolv.conf.
 (2) Next, AIX sends the result of step 1 to the nameserver(s) listed in
 /etc/resolv.conf.

 I made a brief scan through the relevant RFC's and I did not find anything
 which indicated that resolution should handle anything but the local domain.
 If you find something to the contrary, please report the discrepency to your
 local IBM representative.

Russ Heise, AIX Technical Support, IBM