NIS, DNS and resolv.conf

Hi,
I've been reading abuot NIS for a while and I found it very
interesting because of the way it provides information, that has to be
known throughout the network, to all machines on the network (such as
login names/passwords/home directories (/etc/passwd) and group
information (/etc/group)).

After configuring servers and clients I was able to share such
informations but I found out that no information about external domain
name resolution was shared across the network.

At first I thought that I misconfigured something but at the end I
realized that maybe there was anything wrong about the configuration
and that was its normal behavior.

I thought about it for a while and then I said to myself:
"Ok, it's almost clear: resolv.conf is not mapped, then NIS clients
have no idea about DNS servers addresses and then they cannot resolv
any domain name apart the ones listed on the hosts file (both the
local one and the one shared with NIS)."

Indeed, if I don't edit resolv.conf on the client machines to make
them look like the one on the server machine I can't resolv any
external domain name.

Now you could tell me that I have DNS for domain name resolution but
on the other hand, as far as I know, about the content of resolv.conf,
there could be two main cases:
1) you have some nameserver entries with the IP addresses of your
provider's DNS servers.
2) you have the address(es) of your network's DNS server(s).

In both of these cases the content of resolv.conf is the same all over
the network so I wonder whether there isn't any support for the
resolv.conf file sharing in NIS or not.

As stated on the Network Administration Guide in TLDP, the goal of NIS
is to ease system administration and having to edit resolv.conf just
one time would be a great advantage IMO.



So my question(s) is (are):
Does it provide any way to share information about DNS servers or not?
If yes, what did I configure wrong?
If not, why?

Could you please give me any pointer to solve this issue?

Thanks.

On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 00:47:19 -0700, ncrfgs wrote:

> So my question(s) is (are):
> Does it provide any way to share information about DNS servers or not?
> If yes, what did I configure wrong?
> If not, why?
>
> Could you please give me any pointer to solve this issue?

I don't know about NIS, but using DHCP will allow you to configure which
DNS servers your clients are supposed to use. This requires you to set-up
a DHCP server but it's quite easy.

--
luc wastiaux
email: luc-at-4002-dot-org
jabber: (E-Mail Removed)

> I don't know about NIS, but using DHCP will allow you to configure which
> DNS servers your clients are supposed to use. This requires you to set-up
> a DHCP server but it's quite easy.

I played a bit with DHCP these days but, as far as I understood, it
doesn't allow you to share '/etc/resolv.conf' file over your network
but it allows you to give directions about how to set
'/etc/resolv.conf' (and '/etc/yp.conf' and '/etc/ntp.conf') file(s) on
the client machines.

This is interesting as a last resort but it isn't what I was looking
for that is to share the file itself the way I share '/etc/ethers' and
'/etc/hosts' files over the network with NIS.

I'm still wondering whether does NIS provide any way to share
information about DNS servers or not and if not why?

I don't mean that NIS should, I'd just like to know why, the reason
and what's the problem with it.



Thanks.