SUMMARY: DNS problems..

From: Linda Lancki (linda@atlas.chemistry.uakron.edu)
Date: Wed Oct 27 1993 - 18:53:28 CDT


I wrote:

> Hi..
>
> Over the weekend, our domain name server suddenly stopped working..
> I don't know what happened.. I didn't change any of the configurations.. I
> even uploaded the domain name files from backup but this hasn't helped.. I
> don't see any problems but all I get is "unknown host" when trying to connect
> to anywhere outside of our domain.. I tried running in.named with the debug
> option but this has not helped me any.. I also dumped the current data base
> and cache and everything 'appears' to be okay.. I'm not sure what else to do
> and/or where else to look.. Any suggestions???
>
> One weird thing is that our one Solaris 2.2 system IS able to reach hosts
> outside our domain - but none of our other systems (all running SunOS) are
> able to get outside the domain (including our domain name server)..
>
> Thanks in advance..
> Linda

And thanks to Mr T Crummey, problem solved.. It turned out that the problem was
actually with NIS.. Several months ago, I changed our NIS slave servers (but not
the master).. I failed to create a /etc/resolv.conf file which contains the
address of the DNS server.. Therefore, machines using these NIS slave servers
were not able to get hostnames outside of our domain (or should I say, hosts not
found in the NIS host file) resolved.. The problem didn't show up earlier
because most of the machines were, by default, using the NIS master which is
also our DNS server.. And nobody ever complained about any problem with the few
machines that were using the NIS slave servers, so I was unaware of any problem
(until our NIS master server defaulted to one of our NIS slave servers).. So I
created a /etc/resolv.conf file on our NIS slaver servers, rebooted them, and
everything is back to normal (or should i say, better than normal)..

I'd also like to thank the following for their replies.. Forgive me if I've
left anyone out..

mele@syl.nj.nec.com (Elaine Mele)
gareth@nmr.ion.bpmf.ac.uk (Dr Gareth Barker)
Dean Ayres <dean.ayres@aea.orgn.uk>
rlyle@nl.oracle.com (Rob Lyle UNIX Sys Admin)
pallas@oclc.org (George Pallas)
Mr T Crummey (DIJ) <tom@sees.bangor.ac.uk>
zshouben@PCS.CNU.EDU (Shouben Zhou)
ems@ccrl.nj.nec.com (Ed Strong)
Viswanath Gopalakrishnan <Viswanath.Gopalakrishnan@mail.ciesin.org>
missrab@Esy.COM (Ross Bawcum)
Heas <heas@chpc.org>
sullivan@austin.nam.slb.com (NETMAN - Jim Sullivan)
swanes@eq.gs.com (Steve Swaney)



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