Installing and Administering Internet Services

70 Chapter 3

Conﬁguring and Administering the BIND Name Service

Conﬁguring the Name Service Switch

The Name Service Switch determines where your system will look for

host information when it needs to resolve a host name to an IP address.

For all types of information except host information, you can conﬁgure

your system to use NIS (one of the NFS Services), NIS+ (the next

generation of NIS), or the local /etc ﬁle, in any order. However, we

recommend that you do not conﬁgure your system to use both NIS and

NIS+.

For host information, you can conﬁgure your system to use BIND (DNS),

NIS, NIS+, or the /etc/hosts ﬁle. As mentioned above, we recommend

that you do not conﬁgure your system to use both NIS and NIS+.

For more information on the Name Service Switch, see “Conﬁguring the

Name Service Switch” on page 31.