DNS lookup order

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DNS lookup order

Sorry if this has been covered already but I spent all of yesterday and good portion of this morning search these and other forums for answers but could not find any.

I work at a small web development company and sometimes our clients (for a myriad of reasons) do not change their DNS settings to point dev.domain.com and stage.domain.com to the IP address of our development server. So as to not hold up development we add the appropriate entries into our /etc/hosts file so we can build their new websites while they work our their DNS issues. Back with 10.4 we would use the /etc/lookupd/hosts file with the line, "LookupOrder Cache FF NI DNS DS", to force the mac to look in the /etc/hosts file first before searching the DNS server. Now that we have upgraded to Leopard lookupd is gone, and I cannot for the life of me find where I can set the lookup order. So my question is what is the Mac OS X 10.5 equivalent of lookupd? or better yet how do I set the DNS lookup order in Leopard?

Thank you,
-isbhod

g5 iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Apr 17, 2008 7:27 AM

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Answer 1

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Apr 17, 2008 12:14 PM in response to isbhod

*man lookupd* points to dscacheutil(1)

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Answer 2

isbhod Author

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Apr 18, 2008 6:44 AM in response to baltwo

Yeah I saw that, but no where in the man page does it talk about lookup order. But I have been known to miss the obvious in the past. If you feel that dscacheutil is where one can specify DNS lookup Order please show me that section of the man page.

Thank you,
-isbhod

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Answer 3

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Apr 18, 2008 11:36 AM in response to isbhod

I don't know, but a lot of people don't know enough to check the manpages. Since DirectoryServices is the underlying service, start with http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Networking/Conceptual/OpenDirectory/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40000917-C H1-DontLinkElementID4 which, AFAICT, hasn't been updated for Leopard. Another option is to post to the appropriate server forum.

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Answer 4

isbhod Author

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Apr 28, 2008 6:30 AM in response to baltwo

Thank you trying the obvious first as all good troubleshoot should begin with, so please understand that I have looked through the man pages and spent about 1.5 days searching the internet for information. It was only when those avenues where exhausted did I post here. For until now I have been able to find answers to my Mac questions within the man pages or with a few simple searches through a message forum or two.

I read the PDF you linked to in your post above, while an interesting read, it refers to 'lookupd' for setting DNS lookup orders, which is no longer used in 10.5 (Leopard).

While I could post this question in the server forum I fear that as this is not a server issue that I will not be taken seriously in the server forum. The issue at hand is how does one manipulate how Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) looks for domain name information? Essentially I am looking for the Mac equivalent of the "nsswitch.conf" ( http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/bsda-book/Changethe_order_of_nameresolution.html) found in Linux, *BSD, and Unix. This has nothing to do with running a server, but everything to do with how the local machine operates.

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Answer 5

baltwo

Level 9

62,386 points

Apr 28, 2008 1:19 PM in response to isbhod

Good luck with solving the problem. I and many responders don't assume anything. If you had stated what you previously searched for, I would have skipped the obvious (but it doesn't apply to most posters). I still recommend posting to the servers forums. Alternatively, try the Unix forum under OS X Technologies where the Unix and Terminal wizards hang out.

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Answer 6

ahmedj

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May 15, 2008 10:29 PM in response to baltwo

baltwo, any luck finding out how to change the lookup order?

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Answer 7

Camelot

Level 9

58,527 points

May 15, 2008 10:44 PM in response to isbhod

how do I set the DNS lookup order in Leopard?

Are you sure you need to?

/etc/hosts has always been the top priority in lookups. You can add entries to /etc/hosts and they'll be used without needing to reconfigure the lookup order.

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Answer 8

ahmedj

Level 1

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May 19, 2008 8:03 PM in response to Camelot

Camelot, when I ping my windows box using the terminal it never works. However using IP address works fine. I read on the internet that Mac OS X doesn't by default have netbios in its look up order...so I want to know how to add netbios lookup? I don't want to manually add machine hostname to ip address mapping in the hosts file...
using nmblookup I get the right ip address...

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