Lookup question

[Joseph S D Yao]

BOY am I glad I looked at your e-mail address before I sent it to
*NO-SPAM*.  ;-(

> I have 3 sub-domains say - horror.movie.edu, comedy.movie.edu and
> sci-fi.movie.edu
> Each has its own pair of primary and slave name servers.
> 
> How should I set up the configuration of each nameserver to allow
> unqualified hostname lookups
> for hosts in the other domains ?  - or should this behaviour be entirely
> taken care of on the client -
> domains  to perform the lookups on ?
> 
> the reason I ask is after a major DNS upgrade of european region
> nameservers, clients are now
> experiencing difficulties resolving hostnames of machines in the other
> domains.  ie. before,
> clients in horror.movie.edu were able to resolv a hostname in
> comedy.movie.edu [smartin.comedy.movie.edu]
> by simply doing a lookup on the unqualified hostname [smartin]  But now
> they cant, and none of the
> clients configurations have changed - only that of my local nameservers.
> 
> Even on my primary nameserver I cannot do lookups on hosts in other
> sub-domains on the same level of our
> 'domain tree' despite having that domain listed in the search order in
> my resolv.conf.
> 
> What is the norm here ?  Should this be resolved on the client side or
> the nameserver side anyway ?
> /Shouold/  hostnames not in the immediate domain always be looked up
> using the FQDN ?

You are one of several people who recently wrote in trying to do
something like this.  It must run in groups.

This must be done on the client side.  If it's using BIND, there is a
search list in /etc/resolv.conf.  If it's using some MS thing, there is
a "Properties" page for DNS resolution that lists the search strings.

Now let me ask my question about this.


WHY?


By doing this, you lose much of the flexibility of separate domains.
You can't have an "aliens" name in horror AND sci-fi AND comedy, and
still expect to use the flat namespace to address it.  Granted, you
allow separate sites to manage their name spaces SEMI-independently ...
they still have to go through a central authority to request a name, or
blindly grope around to see whether another site is already using that
name.  And, of course, you save the users from knowing about the horrors
of domains.  Is this sufficient?


--
Joe Yao				jsdy at cospo.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
COSPO/OSIS Computer Support					EMT-B
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