DNS is a networked database system that's used for sharing machine names
and IP addresses across the network.
On the main screen, you can configure the domains that
you want to search for names in and the servers
where you get your DNS information from. These can both contain multiple
entries; if, for example, you wished to be able to telnet to machines in
both pell.chi.il.us and pell.local domains, you'd add both
these domains into the domains list -- then you'd be able to telnet
to gehenna.pell.chi.il.us by telnet gehenna, and to
webshield.pell.local by telnet webshield.
If you press the [OPTIONS] button, another screen will
come up that lets you set various optional DNS.
- ndots
-
Set the number of dots that must appear in a filename before the name
resolver adds your domains to it. ndots
defaults to 1, which means that any name containing a dot will not
be looked up inside any of your domains. If you have a complicated
domain containing multiple levels of subdomain, you might want to
set this to something else (for example, if you are in the
pell.chi.il.us domain, but that domain has the two subdomains
pdx and lisle, setting ndots to 2 will allow the resolver to search
for pell.pdx and tsfr.lisle as pell.pdx.pell.chi.il.us
and tsfr.lisle.pell.chi.il.us.
- resolver debugging
-
sets RES_DEBUG in the resolver options. For further information, you will
need to look at the online manual pages for named.
- search order
-
Sets the system search order. The default is hosts,bind, which
means look in the system /etc/hosts file, then query DNS for
the name. You can change it to use the hosts file, DNS (bind
is the name that the system uses), or NIS services.
- sort list
-
This is used to sort the results of a name lookup by IP address. A sortlist
is a list of network addresses (optionally followed by / and a netmask),
and this will be applied to any results so that the results will attempt to
follow the sortlist.