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Message-ID: <29584.9105081116@orbweb.spider.co.uk>
From: Keith Mitchell <keith@spider.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 8 May 91 12:16:18 WET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mips
Subject: Problems with BIND on MIPS RISC/os 4.52
Precedence: bulk


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 ?

In the Berkeley documentation, it categorically says that it should
be. But in the MIPS "resolv.conf" man page, it implies that the
domain should be set by the "domainname" command:

     domain name         The default domain to append to names
                         that do not have a dot in them.  This
                         defaults to the domain set by the
                         domainname(1) command.

However, in my experience, `domainname` is normally associated with
the YP/NIS domain only, and indeed in the "getdomainname" man page it says:

     At the current time, only the Network Information Service
     (NIS) makes use of domains.

Further, my experiments indicate that the value of `domainname` has
no effect on BIND operation.

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.

My problem is, that if I set up a MIPS system with a FQDN for the
`hostname`, (e.g. "redknee.spider.co.uk"), and null for `domainname`,
then it sends a whole load of spurious queries. With a "resolv.conf"
file containing:

nameserver 134.191.128.6
nameserver 134.191.64.3

and a "vis.conf" with:

host: dns files		(telling it to the consult DNS before the 
                         /etc/hosts file, no YP)

and I then try to resolve, say "raft", the first query it sends to
the nameserver is doubly qualified - "raft.spider.co.uk.spider.co.uk".

When this fails, it tries "raft.spider.co.uk.co.uk", and only on the
third attempt does it get it right with "raft.spider.co.uk". 

My understanding was that the default domain was only appended
(once) if the name to be resolved was either single-token, or
non-local.

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`.

The other way I can make this problem go away is to make the
`hostname` a FQDN with a "." at the end, but this has even more dire
implications for mail.

This is a fairly serious problem for me, as all these spurious, doubly-
qualified queries, which seem to me to be completely avoidable,
can badly sieze up our systems while they munge through them
waiting for the correct response.

The problems are further compounded by the version of named supplied
with RISC/os 4.52 - I am not quite sure what release it is, but
I suspect before 4.8.1. Irrespective of release, turning on deugging
(via -d or "kill -SIGUSR1") causes the named process to bomb out.

While I can probably put 4.8.3 named up to fix this, replacing
the resolver libabries is out of the question, and I would
like to try and get the existing resolvers to behave sensibly
before I try sorting named out.

I really can't help feeling this shouldn't all be as involved as
this, and that I am missing something somewhere. Can anyone
with experience of running DNS on MIPS systems cast any light ?

Thanks,

Keith Mitchell                  (postmaster)

Spider Systems Ltd.             Spider Systems Inc.
Stanwell Street                 12 New England Executive Park
Edinburgh, Scotland             Burlington
Phone: +44 31-554 9424          MA 01803
Fax:   +44 31-554 0649          +1 (617) 270-3510

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