I am sooo confused...

[Barry Margolin]

In article <aaujig$1jr7$1 at isrv4.isc.org>, James Lee <csejl at yahoo.com> wrote:
>- Can my DNS server westwood.st.mycompany.com host say
>james.st.mycompany.com?  In other words, my machine name and domain
>name can be different, correct?

Of course.  Web hosting companies provide DNS for thousands of domains that
are different from the DNS server's name.  There's absolutely no
relationship between the name of the DNS server and the names of the
domains it seves.

>- In order for my clients to refer to my DNS server as simply
>westwood, do I need to have another entry like this?
>
>westwood.westwood.st.mycompany.com. IN A 151.155.184.160
>
>Why Can't I just to refer to it as westwood.st.mycompany.com?

When they type "westwood", their resolver looks in its list of default
domains, and tries appending each of those suffixes to the name.  So if
their default domain is "westwood.st.mycompany.com", and they type
"somename", it looks up "somename.westwood.st.mycompany.com".  If you want
them to be able to look up "westwood.st.mycompany.com" by typing
"westwood", you'll need them to add "st.mycompany.com" to their default
domain search list.

>- When I ping NIMS-NW6 from wilshire, I get this error saying,
>"Warning: time of day goes back, taking countermeasures."  All the
>machines here are maybe off by a couple minutes.  Can this cause this
>and how can I fix it?

I don't think this has anything to do with DNS, since there are no times in
DNS messages.

>- Currently, I don't have db.cache on my DNS server.  Can you tell me
>what this file is for and if I need to have it for everything to work
>correctly?

db.cache is used to find the root servers, which is needed to be able to
look up names outside the domains you're hosting.

>- Does my DNS server have to point to its parent DNS server in
>/etc/resolv.conf?  I am asking b/c my clients right now can't resolve
>anything besides the machines that are in westwood.st.mycompany.com.

The DNS server doesn't use /etc/resolv.conf.  See the answer to your
previous question.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
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