Re: [Sheflug] Re: My First Post - Connecting Linux to the Internet

[Richard Stevenson <nospam [at] team.xtra.co.nz>]

On Mon, 6 Nov 2000, Chris J/#6 wrote:

> > I doesn't necessarily have to be the
> > DNS of your ISP, anyone will do. You just need to find a DNS out there on
> > the internet that can resolve names into machine addresses for you; once
> > you've found one if it can't resolve a name for you it passes it on to the
> > next one.
> 
> This is actaully a bad thing to do in general, though it may work, it 
> shouldn't really be used.
> 
> 2. Unless its advertised as a DNS box, then the owner of the machine is free 
> to disable DNS, or access to DNS on the box, leaving you helpless until you 
> find a new server to hook into.

And even if it is advertised as a DNS server, you may not get far -
rata.vuw.ac.nz, for example, has .nz and a bunch of other things (co.nz,
ac.nz, etc)  delegated to it.  You'll be able to ask it for those things,
but unless you're on the VUW network, it will refuse to answer queries for
anything it's not authoritative for (or at least that's the way it was
configured last time I had access to that system).  In theory, even VUW
shouldn't use it as a DNS server for client workstations, but they're too
cheap to run a root-level DNS server correctly.

Cheers

Richard

-- 
Richard Stevenson                       |    Help Microsoft stamp out software
Systems Support Specialist              |    piracy: install Linux today!
richard.stevenson@team.xtra.co.nz       |
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