Installing and Administering Internet Services

92 Chapter 3
Configuring and Administering the BIND Name Service
Configuring the Resolver to Query a Remote Name Server
Do not put a trailing dot at the end of the domain name.
NOTE If you want to run both BIND and HP VUE, you must have an
/etc/resolv.conf file on your system, or HP VUE will not start.
If a user sets the LOCALDOMAIN environment variable, any BIND
requests made within the context of the user’s shell environment will use
the search list specified in the LOCALDOMAIN variable. The
LOCALDOMAIN variable overrides the domain and search options in
/etc/resolv.conf.
On HP-UX releases before 10.0, by default, if the resolver could not find
the requested host by appending the local domain, it would append the
parent of the local domain and the grandparent of the local domain. It
would not append just the top-level domain (like com or edu). For
example, if BIND could not find host name aardvark in the local domain
zoo.bio.nmt.edu, it would look for aardvark.bio.nmt.edu and
aardvark.nmt.edu but not aardvark.edu.
On HP-UX release 10.0 and later releases, by default, if you do not
specify a search list in /etc/resolv.conf, the resolver will append
only the local domain to the input host name.
If you want BIND to behave as it did in releases before 10.0, configure a
search list in the /etc/resolv.conf file. The following search list
causes BIND to search the zoo.bio.nmt.edu domain as it did by
default in releases before 10.0:
search zoo.bio.nmt.edu bio.nmt.edu nmt.edu
CAUTION In order to reduce situations that may cause connections to unintended
destinations, you should carefully select which domains you put in the
search list in the /etc/resolv.conf file. Hewlett-Packard
recommends that the possible domains for the search list be limited to
those domains administered within your trusted organization. For more
information on the security implications of search lists, please read RFC
1535, located in the /usr/share/doc directory.
Type man 4 resolver or man 5 hostname the HP-UX prompt for
more details, or see “How BIND Resolves Host Names” on page 65.