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Re: nsswitch.conf & host.conf



Lewis, James M. wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The discussion on named brought up a question or two.  I went looking for
> documentation on nsswitch.conf and couldn't find any (in man, anyway).  But,
> I did find host.conf.  Looks like host.conf and nsswitch.conf have very similar
> functions.  What's the difference?  When do you use one and not the other, etc.??

I like nsswitch. Lot's of people don't like it for passwd because it lacks the
flexibility of the old-style way of doing things. libc6 uses nsswitch, but when you
put 'compat' in then the behavior is like the oldstyle. You can control hosts lookups
from nsswitch. If you don't have 'hosts: compat' in /etc/nsswitch.conf then in my
understanding /etc/host.conf *should not* be consulted. BTW, my /etc/nsswitch.conf has
a comment that says docs for the file are in the libc-doc package, since you didn't
mention this perhaps you missed this.

--
Jens B. Jorgensen
jjorgens@bdsinc.com



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