Re: Newbie DNS setup help!

sean watson <sean@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I'm sure you guys have seen this question a million times - but here goes
anyway.

I am new to Solaris - have just got hold of a Blade 100 and am trying to get
it up and running. Hope you don't mind - but would really appreciate a few
tips on configuring DNS in Solaris as I haven't used Solaris before. Am
used to Linux distros that happily configure DHCP to get DNS address direct
from my router. I installed Solaris and can ping my router - so ethernet is
live. However - tried the DHCP option during intallation and it asked for
DNS info - but when I gave it my router domain name and ip address it kept
telling me that the info was incorrect. So - decided to try setting it to
static. Did that - and then didn't set DNS during installation. Then when
logged into Java desktop - created a etc/inet/resolve.conf - linked to an
etc/resolve.conf symlink. Put in

search Belkin (my router domain name)
domain Belkin
nameserver 192.168.2.1 (router ip address)

This is the configuration that the router has DHCPd to my linux boxes - so
figured it would work for this.

Also put 'dns' next to 'hosts' in /etc/nsswitch.conf (got all of these
instructions from Blastwave web site tutorial).

Still won't resolve though! I know that DNS is the problem because if I put
an ip address direct into the browser it works fine.

Have tried putting my ISP domain into resolve.conf, have tried putting my
ISPs DNS server addresses directly in too. Nothing seems to work. What am I
doing wrong? Would really appreciate any suggestions you might have.

I think that *** found the problem for you: the file is resolv.conf, not
resolve.conf.

However, let me take this opportunity to stand up on my soapbox, and
point out another (non-fatal) flaw in your resolv.conf file: You should
only have domain OR search in your file, not both.

From resolv.conf(4)
The domain and search keywords are mutually exclusive. If
more than one instance of these keywords is present, the
last instance takes precedence.

I would say that >80% of the Sun machines in the world have both domain
and search in resolv.conf, at least from my experience. Usually 'search'
is the last line in the file so it behaves the way people think they want
it anyways, but it doesn't change the fact that it's wrong.

Just something you should know.

Cheers,
Colin
.