Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

Enabling Host Name Resolving

Now that we have the correct routes set up, we need to enable host name resolving. The reason for this is that we will almost certainly be connecting to machines that we don't know the IP address for—be it to send mail or view Web pages, for example.

We explained earlier that host name resolving is a function of DNS, so we now need to enable this. There are only two tasks we need to do at this point: The first is to instruct the system to use DNS for host name resolving, and the second is to inform it which nameserver it should use for the lookups.

To do the first, we update the nameservice switch file. Ours was previously set to use “local files” only, so we can now alter it to also use DNS. Since DNS is only used ...