alex <radsky@ncia.net> [2003-01-04 19:54:47 -0500]:
For the benefit of someone who doesn't have much experience
and occasionally has a problem understanding
generalizations, could you elaborate a bit on these?
Let me try.
"A better solution is to edit /etc/dhclient.conf.
Since dhcpclient is a conf file directly it has a very simple syntax.
It describes what someone wants to do but without saying how it will
be done. This separates the method from the madness.
Right now the dhcp-script is a '#!/bin/sh' script. But in the future
one might want to make that a '#!/usr/bin/env ruby' script instead.
The implementation could be very different in the future. If you have
made changes to the script then you might find it hard to merge your
changes into the new methodology. But the configuration file should
be simpler and might even be either fully compatible or automatically
translatable.
Regardless, if it is marked as a conffile then when dpkg tries to
update it you will get asked interactively if you want to replace it
with the new one or keep your old one. If you have made changes you
will need to decide how to handle it at that time. If you are not
sure then it is safe to copy off the old, then say replace with new,
and then merge your changes in again with the new conf file. That way
you keep up with package changes.
Use one of
append search foo.example bar.example
prepend search foo.example bar.example
depending on the effect you want. "
And, what effect might someone want?
This affects your search order. Without either it is your current
domain. But if you are adding a new one you might want to put it
either before or after. I will assume DHCP since that is the simpler
client case.
What typically exists is that someone sets up a domain, fake or
otherwise, for themselves. But they want to use their ISP's news
server. So the append the ISP's domain to their search path.
search dhcpserver-domain.home isp.com
This way when 'news' is resolved it will not find one locally and will
fall through to finding the ISP's news server. But other names in the
local domain take precedence.
Conversely if they are using the ISP's DHCP they will get the ISP
domain by default. They may want to set up their own network names
for other things and would 'prepend' their own fake domain. This way
they could print to their network printer 'inkjet.jones.home' without
any problem of colliding with injet.dhcpserver-domain-at-isp.com.
search jones.home dhcpserver-domain-at-isp.com
This is all contrived but perhaps helps to explain things.
Bob