[TAG] resolv.conf

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 09:27:46AM -0400, Claude S. Sutton wrote:
> I lost a bunch of emails this morning so I looked at /etc/resolv.conf 
> and found that the "order hosts,bind" was gone.
> 
> Apparently when I did "pon alltel" this morning, the pppconfig file 
> overwrote the change in "resolv.conf" that I made last night.
> 
> How do I overcome this?

You don't need to overcome it at all, since 'order hosts,bind' doesn't
belong in '/etc/resolv.conf' but rather in '/etc/host.conf'. The former
is arbitrarily modified by PPP when you connect to a new server in order
to provide you with "contact information" for that server's DNS; the
latter is your system's resolver configuration, which is only modified
by you.

In general - at least on private machines (as contrasted against
corporate systems with huge '/etc/hosts' files) - 'host.conf' is a
simple affair:
          
```      
order hosts, bind
multi on 
'''

This specifies that the system should resolve DNS queries by first doing
a lookup in local files (i.e., '/etc/hosts') and then check with the
Internet Name Domain service (the 'B' stands for the original Berkeley
version of the system.) 'multi on' tells the resolver library to look up
all the addresses for a given host rather than just the first one.

'/etc/resolv.conf' is, again, nearly arbitrary; expecting its contents
to remain the same after a PPP reconnection will bring you no joy.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *