Diald HOWTO

5. Notes about DNS name resolution

Everytime you connect to an ISP, it is necesary to have configured DNS name resolution, so your computer can find IP addresses associated to a computer name.

IP addresses of your DNS servers are placed into the /etc/resolv.conf file.

In a standalone computer connecting to Internet, this file usually contains the IP addresses of your ISP's DNS servers:

#/etc/resolv.conf file for ISPname
nameserver 111.222.333.444
nameserver 222.333.444.555

In a proxy/firewall computer, this file usually contains its own IP address (or the loopback address, 127.0.0.1), and this computer includes a DNS server that translates DNS names to IP addresses by querying external DNS servers.

#/etc/resolv.conf file for local DNS resolution
nameserver 127.0.0.1

Installation of a local DNS server is out of the scope of this document. There is a lot of documentation about this, but a good and quick approach can be found in the DNS-Howto ( http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Howto/DNS-HOWTO.html).