Installing and Administering Internet Services

Chapter 2 35

Installing and Conﬁguring Internet Services

Conﬁguring Internet Addresses

This section tells you how to conﬁgure your host to ﬁnd other hosts on

the network, by host name or IP address. It contains the following

sections:

• “To Choose a Name Service” on page 35

• “To Edit the /etc/hosts File” on page 36

• “To Conﬁgure Routes” on page 37

• “To Change a Host’s IP Address” on page 38

To Choose a Name Service

HP-UX provides four ways of translating host names to IP addresses or

IP addresses to host names:

• The /etc/hosts ﬁle, a simple ASCII ﬁle that is searched

sequentially.

• BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), which is Berkeley’s

implementation of the Domain Name System (DNS).

• NIS (Network Information Service), one of the NFS Services. (NIS

used to be called “Yellow Pages”.)

• NIS+ (the next generation of NIS). NIS+ is more scalable and has

better security features than NIS.

By conﬁguring the Name Service Switch, you can use these name

services in any order you choose. See “Conﬁguring the Name Service

Switch” on page 31.

If you have a large network, or you need to connect to Internet hosts

outside your local network, use BIND as your primary name service.

When you use BIND, you administer a central database containing only

the hosts on your local network, and you have access to the databases on

all the other hosts on the Internet. See “Conﬁguring and Administering

the BIND Name Service” on page 59 for instructions on conﬁguring

BIND.