RS6000 named problem

[Charles Derykus]

> 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)... For on-campus hosts in other departments, however,
> > you would expect to be able to use hostname.dept-domain...that doesn't 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.
 


RFC 1034, pg 8 says it all:

	"When a user needs to type a domain name, the length of each label is
	 omitted and the labels are separated by dots ("."). Since a complete
	 domain name ends with a root label, this leads to a printed form which
	 ends in a dot. We use this property to distinquish between:

	 - a character string which represents a complete domain name
	   (often called "absolute").  For example, "poneria.ISI.EDU."

	 - a character string that represents the starting labels of a 
	   domain name which is incomplete, and should be completed by
	   local software using knowledge of the local domain (often
	   called "relative"). For example, "poneria" used in the
	   ISI.EDU domain."

<If the name has a period (.) anywhere in it, AIX leaves it untouched> just
doesn't do the job and clearly violates the spirit if not the letter of the
RFC.  In an increasingly complicated network environment, you want named to
append the domain if the "character string" is not "absolute". Otherwise,
for any subdomain within the current domain, a user will be forced to
fully qualify the domain name, e.g., in the example above you would have
to specify "host.dept-name.cs.uiowa.edu" instead of just "host.dept-name"
with named appending the current domain "cs.uiowa.edu" to the relative
name.  Other vendor platforms (Sun, SGI, HP, Apollo, Ultrix) all conform
to the RFC.

For any dept's outside "cs.uiowa.edu", you would reasonably expect to have
to fully qualify the name.  But within your own domain, "you should get
more for your money".

Charles DeRykus				Internet:   ced at bcstec.boeing.com
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