nslookup issues on hp-ux
Praveen Kumar Amritaluru
praveen at india.hp.com
Sat Feb 24 15:53:39 UTC 2001
>
> Praveen Kumar Amritaluru wrote:
>
> > >
> > > At 06:33 22.02.2001 -0800, you wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > >Okay, now I'm really confused. I thought nslookup called resolver
> > > >routines, which are supposed to check /etc/nsswitch.conf. The libbind.a
> > > >looks like it compiles its own versions of the resolver routines, then
> > > >gets linked into nslookup. So it is not using the native resolver routines
> > > >from HP-UX, which, according to the man pages, go to nsswitch.conf to see
> > > >where to resolve from. Also, both texts I consulted ("DNS and BIND, 3rd
> > > >Ed." and "(The Concise Guide to) DNS and BIND") describe this resolver
> > > >behavior, that nslookup uses the resolver to find which service to use
> > > >(files, DNS or NIS). I'm very confused at this point and don't know what
> > > >to believe...
> >
> > Still nslookup that comes up with HP's distribution will be
> > following /etc/nsswitch.conf file. If you want the latest version
> > of nslookup, then try downloading BIND 8.1.2 on HP-UX available
> > at http://www.software.hp.com.
> >
> > But the public domain nslookup code does not use the
> > /etc/nsswitch.conf file and more over the nslookup is built from
> > static library libbind.a which does not read the nsswitch.conf
> > file. nslookup that you were using earlier should be working
> > well with new version of BIND.
> >
> > Public domain nslookup code should be doing this modification,
> > as IP add. - hostname information is stored not just in DNS,
> > but also in FILES & NIS.
>
> I disagree vehemently. nslookup is a *DNS-specific* lookup tool. It comes with the
> BIND distribution; in fact, its code was ripped out of an early BIND codebase and
> made standalone. The "ns" in "nslookup" is echoed from "DNS". Nobody ever intended
> it to be the all-singing, all-dancing, generic lookup tool for all naming sources
> in the known universe, and in fact it would be horrible for that, since it only
> understands a DNS or DNS-like naming hierarchy. It would be totally hopeless, for
> instance, trying to navigate X.500, Active Directory or even NetInfo.
>
> Besides, the more useful you make nslookup, the longer it lives. It should have
> already been buried by now, because of all of its quirks and flaws.
>
>
> - Kevin
>
I dont want to get into discussion on whether nslookup should be
obsoleted or not as there was already a big discussion on this
mailing-list over this issue.
It may be true that there are flaws in nslookup.
But the fact is that there are lot of people who still use
nslookup and would not be able to migrate from nslookup to other
tools within a short period of time.
It is for these people that the value add of nslookup will be
very useful.
It may be true that nslookup was a tool that got developed from
BIND code base and was not intended to be all singing.... But
it is also true that people will still need a tool to query for
hostname resolution irrespective of whether they are using
DNS/FILES/NIS etc...
If nslookup is not going to be the tool that is going to do the
resolution of hostnames to IP address and viceversa, then there
should be some other tool that will do this for the users in
place of nslookup. I dont see any reasons why a single tool
should not be used and avoid usage of different tools for
querying different sources in place of a single tool.
If nslookup can be modified without much complexity to query
other databases then the same can be used.
-Praveen
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These views are mine only and not related to HP
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