[SunHELP] nis and name resolving

[Carl-Johan Schenstrom]

On Mon, 23 Jul 2001, David Baldwin wrote:

> Please correct me if I am mistaken.  I was under the impression that the
> NIS server provided name lookup services.  And that the NIS server was
> the only hosts that needed a resolv.conf in /etc, all NIS clients would
> check with the NIS server for ALL names.
> I am getting errors with nslookup; "*** Can't find server name for
> address 127.0.0.1: Unspecified error
> *** Default servers are not available"
> when I don't have a resolv.conf but I am using nsswitch.nis and the NIS
> server has no problems.

>From nslookup(1m):

"nslookup sends queries to Internet domain name servers."
                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

What this means is that nslookup is only used to query DNS. Use getent(1m)
to query the name service.

//cjs