Re: DNS lookup with Netscape 4.5, 4.51 and 4.6
Quoting Adam Rice (wysiwyg@glympton.airtime.co.uk):
> Quoting Stephan Engelke (engelke@math.uni-hamburg.de):
> > If so, what might cause the problem - what could I do to solve it?
>
> It appears to me that Netscape's host lookup behaviour has changed so it is
> not looking in /etc/hosts before asking your DNS server. This would explain
> why you haven't seen the problem in previous versions of Netscape.
>
> Probably what you want is to put a
>
> forward only;
>
> line in the options { } section of your /etc/named.conf file. (This assumes
> you are running a fairly recent version of BIND 8). This lobotimises your
> DNS server so that if it fails to get a response from its forwarders, it
> gives up (instead of going out on the Internet to find the answer itself).
> What this means in effect is that gethostbyname() returns immediately when
> you are not online, rather than waiting for a long timeout.
Sorry for following up to my own message, but I have discovered that the
version of named supplied with slink (8.1.2-T3B) doesn't actually have this
feature. Name service lookups will still stall when offline, even with the
forward only; directive. This changed sometime before version 8.2-T6B, which
I ran before installing Debian. It might be possible for you to get named
from unstable (which is presumably more recent), otherwise do what I do and
use a file: URL as your home page.
--
Adam Rice -- wysiwyg@glympton.airtime.co.uk -- Blackburn, Lancashire, England
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