/etc/resolv.conf

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 04:25:53PM -0700, Joe Hamelin wrote:
> So, for the caching server to resolve things itself you would want to
> put 127.0.0.1 in /etc/resolv.conf.  I thought he was asking what he
> should put there.  Sorry to piss you off so much. I'll just shut up
> and let you yell at everyone from now on.
> 
> -Joe "only been using named for 10 years" Hamelin
> 
> On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 18:02:07 -0400, Joseph S D Yao <jsdy at center.osis.gov> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, Jun 22, 2004 at 01:30:34AM -0500, Matt wrote:
> > > If you want your Linux box to act as a caching DNS server using root servers
> > > do you leave /etc/resolv.conf blank or what?
> > >
> > > Matt
> > 
> > /etc/resolv.conf has NOTHING to do with the server portion of BIND,
> > only with the resolver portion.  It points the resolver portion, for
> > programs running on that box, to some name server or another.  If it's
> > blank, none of the programs running on the system will be able to
> > resolve any host names or IP addresses.  [Except for the name daemon,
> > if you are running it, since it's completely independent of
> > /etc/resolv.conf.]
> > 
> > A purely caching name server very simply has no zones [except root].

Sorry if it sounded like I was annoyed.  At least two of you thought
so.  My only annoyance is at the long-standing confusion between the
resolver library (yes, STUB resolver) and the name server parts of the
BIND package.  I too was confused about this when I first dived head-
first into BIND and DNS.  Perhaps I or someone else should have long
since submitted a change to the start of the documentation to read,
"Omnis BINDia in duo partes divisa est ..."  Sorry, for those without a
weird sense of humour or a Latinate background, that's a perversion of
the start of one of Julius Caesar's books, to read: BIND is divided
into two parts ...

My understanding is that the original poster's question was primarily,
how do you create a purely caching name server, and secondarily, do you
do this by nuking the /etc/resolv.conf file.  If I misread, again,
apologies.  I've got about ten priority-zero tasks crowding out the
umpty priority-one tasks, so I turned back to this for a breather.
Perhaps the wrong thing to do.

-- 
Joe Yao				jsdy at center.osis.gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
OSIS Center Systems Support					EMT-B
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