Moving from BIND 4.8.1 (!!) to 9.2.0

[Mark_Andrews at isc.org]

> Looking for help on a problem that has me confused...
> 
> Our company currently runs BIND 4.8.1 on an RS6000. It was set up years ago
> and no-one's touched it since. The zone files get built from a host file
> that is maintained elsewhere and FTPd across every night. I have a task to
> replace it with a Linux RedHat 7.2 installation and have chosen to install
> BIND 9.2.0. All went well and testing on the server is all ok. The problem
> that I have encountered is that address queries are not resolved when coming
> from other PCs. All other PC's are running Win95 or W2K but they do not have
> a primary DNS suffix defined. So the query is sent without the domain name
> attached. That explains why the query would fail. And I've confirmed it by
> changing a PC to include the domain name and then it works fine. But *why*
> does the old 4.8.1 DNS server work and resolve the same queries? It would
> appear that it must append the domain name itself. Is there some way of
> getting 9.2.0 to work in the same way? I don't want to turn around and say
> that 2,500 PCs need their configuration changing! Is there some way of
> getting the 9.2 name server to automatically append a default domain if one
> isn't specified? Am I making any sense?
> 
> Well I'm at a loss and any help or insights would be much appreciated.
> 
> Nigel

	Well there are DHCP options for setting the search list.  I would
	hope that with 2500 PC's that you were using DHCP.

	The reason that 4.8.1 worked is that any query that was a single
	label (excluding the root label) could have a domain appended to
	it by the server before it was looked up.  See the domain directive
	in named.boot.
	
	Mark
--
Mark Andrews, Internet Software Consortium
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: Mark.Andrews at isc.org