!-- Updated Thu Jul 11 22:25:23 MET DST 1996 by [email protected]

The host.conf File

The central file that controls your resolver setup is host.conf. It resides in /etc and tells the resolver which services to use, and in what order.

Options in host.conf must occur on separate lines. Fields may be separated by white space (spaces or tabs). A hash sign (#) introduces a comment that extends to the next newline.

The following options are available:

order

This determines the order in which the resolving services are tried. Valid options are :

• bind for querying the name server
• hosts for lookups in /etc/hosts
• nis for NIS lookups.

Any or all of them may be specified. The order in which they appear on the line determines the order in which the respective services are tried.

multi

Takes on or off as options. This determines if a host in /etc/hosts is allowed to have several IP addresses, which is usually referred to as being ``multi-homed''. This flag has no effect on DNS or NIS queries.

nospoof

As explained in the previous chapter, DNS allows you to find the hostname belonging to an IP address by using the in- addr.arpa domain. Attempts by name servers to supply a false hostname are called ``spoofing''. To guard against this, the resolver may be configured to check if the original IP address is in fact associated with the hostname obtained. If not, the name is rejected and an error returned. This behavior is turned on by setting nospoof on.

alert

This option takes on or off as arguments. If it is turned on, any spoof attempts (see above) will cause the resolver to log a message to the syslog facility.

trim

This option takes a domain name as an argument, which will be removed from hostnames before lookup. This is useful for hosts entries, where you might only want to specify hostnames with- out local domain. A lookup of a host with the local domain name appended will have this removed, thus allowing the lookup in /etc/hosts to succeed. trim options accumulate, making it possible to consider your host as being local to several domains.

A sample file for vlager is shown below:

           # /etc/host.conf
           # We have named running, but no NIS (yet)
           order   bind hosts
           # Allow multiple addrs
           multi   on
           # Guard against spoof attempts
           nospoof on
           # Trim local domain (not really necessary).
           trim    vbrew.com.