NetInfo DNS resolver info

Recording this here for future posterity -- it's also buried deep in comp.sys.next.sysadmin (https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.next.sysadmin/c/XQ0gNxha3y8).
Apologies if it's recorded elsewhere.

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Danger, Will Robinson!
This appears to work only in NEXTSTEP 3.3 and higher!

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How to get your resolver info into NetInfo so you don't have to care about /etc/resolv.conf.

As root,
niload -p -r /locations/resolver / <<EOF
name = resolver;
domain = somewhere.com;
search = somewhere.com;
nameserver = (111.111.111.111, 222.222.222.222, 333.333.333.333);
hostresorder = (bind, local);
EOF

This should result in a directory being created with properties that looks like:


You'll want to ensure you've added host entries for your name servers.

e.g. here we can see host entries for `enterprise' and `neutralzone' have been created with HostManager:


Now we can ensure that the NI resolver location is available on our client machines with the command
nidump -r /locations /
Output should look like:


You can also get the specific directory by using
nidump -r /locations/resolver /
Then we can have lots of fun by testing things!

Great! Immediately added this to Previous. I can confirm that resolv.conf is no longer needed.

Awesome!  Glad something I did ended up being put in Previous :)


Just for the record, the host entries for the nameserver(s) probably aren't an absolute requirement, but I add them anyway, just in case something tries to be pedantic and look up the resolver's IPs via the hosts directory.

Seems to work perfectly on NeXTStep 3.3 and OPENSTEP 4.2. Older versions, like NeXTStep 1.0 and 2.0 do not seem to support this. I still need resolv.conf there.

Yeah, I suspect it was added in NEXTSTEP 3.0.

I'll edit the post to make that clearer :)

I just tested all versions from 3.0 to 3.3 and it seems 3.3 is the only version supporting the resolver. The others do not even look for it. So I think it's 3.3 and later (OPENSTEP) supporting this.

Oh now that's interesting, and also annoying at the same time.  The Schrödinger's Cat of features.

I'll update the post again  :-[