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From: lgy@phys.washington.edu (Laurence Yaffe)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Re: Problems with BIND on MIPS RISC/os 4.52
Message-ID: <lgy.673734957@newton>
Date: 8 May 91 20:35:57 GMT
References: <29584.9105081116@orbweb.spider.co.uk>
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News)
Organization: University of Washington
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Keith Mitchell <keith@spider.co.uk> writes:

>I have been grappling for some time now with trying to get BIND
>working properly on our various MIPS machines, and must admit to
>being no further, and still rather confused.

>My confusion arises from various inconsistencies between the MIPS
>and Berkeley documentation for BIND, and between various MIPS manual
>pages on the subject. Some of this is not new, but here I will only
>refer to the 4.52 RISC/os release.

>The main question is: should the value returned by the `hostname`
>command be fully qualified or not ?
>	[deleted]
>The other thing which suggests that a FQDN should be used for the
>hostname, is that the "hostname" command supports the "-s" option,
>for truncating a FQDN to just the first token. This is not
>documented.
>	[deleted]

>I can make this problem go away if I set the `hostname` to just a
>single token (e.g. "redknee"). This requires a "domain spider.co.uk"
>directive to be added to /etc/resolv.conf, so that the system knows
>what its default domain is.  The problem here, is that if I want to
>run a named on the host, as a secondary or caching server, it has no
>means of knowing what domain it is in unless it is set in
>/etc/resolv.conf. Berkeley documentation and acknowlegded wisdom on
>this list is quite clear you should *not* have a resolv.conf file on
>a host running a server. Also, sendmail (5.61+IDA) does not seem to
>be entirely happy with a non-FQDN `hostname`.


    I can't speak about what's "right" (or is that "politically correct" :-)),
but I can say that on all of our MIPS, Sun and Ultrix machines:

    `hostname` returns a non-qualified name,
    `domainname` returns the local domain name,
    /etc/resolv.conf contains a line "domain <some>.<domain>.<name>"
	(consistent with what "domainname" returns),
    sendmail and other BIND queries work fine.

On our MIPS machines which run named servers, we do have /etc/resolv.conf files.
Past experimentation showed this to be absolutely necessary.

As to related sendmail problems, the only issue I know of is the following:
Most versions of sendmail (including those shipped by MIPS and Sun) return
the fully qualified hostname in the $w variable, whereas the Ultrix version
apparently returns the unqualified hostname.  (Thanks DEC.)  Because of this,
we use a sendmail.cf which can be configured to accept either form.  It works.

--
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Laurence G. Yaffe		Internet: lgy@newton.phys.washington.edu
University of Washington	Bitnet:   yaffe@uwaphast.bitnet