[lug] DNS and hosts file

[rm at mamma.varadinet.de]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 02:40:15PM -0600, Ferdinand P. Schmid wrote:
> HI,
> I am noticing that computers that act as caching and local DNS servers
> are having problems with local name resolution.
> - If I include the server itself in my resolv.conf then it won't go out
> to the real DNS servers to look up Internet addresses.
> - If I don't include the server in the resolv.conf then it can't look up
> internal network addresses because it only searches the Internet
> servers.  The workaround seems to be to enter all the local hosts also
> in the local hosts file.
> 
> Is there a more elegant way to configure this so that I only need to
> maintain one set of address tables for the DNS?  Basically I want to
> tell the system to use the local DNS rather than the local hosts file.
> 

You could simply configure your local DNS server (which you only use
to resolve internal names/addresses, i assume) to also answer queries
for external names. If you use a newer version of the bind server you can
add:

options {

 ...

   forwarders {
      19n.nnn.nnn.nnn;
   };

 ...

};

to the named configuration file. All queries for zones not covered by
the local server will be forwarded to the server(s) given here.

Hope this helps


   Ralf