Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 10 SP2 - INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION Installation Manual page 582

The top of the hierarchy is occupied by root name servers. These root name servers
manage the top level domains and are run by the Network Information Center (NIC).
Each root name server knows about the name servers responsible for a given top level
domain. Information about top level domain NICs is available at
.internic.net.
DNS can do more than just resolve hostnames. The name server also knows which host
is receiving e-mails for an entire domain—the mail exchanger (MX).
For your machine to resolve an IP address, it must know about at least one name server
and its IP address. Easily specify such a name server with the help of YaST. If you have
a modem dial-up connection, you may not need to configure a name server manually
at all. The dial-up protocol provides the name server address as the connection is made.
The configuration of name server access with SUSE Linux Enterprise® is described in
Chapter 33, The Domain Name System (page 615).
The protocol whois is closely related to DNS. With this program, quickly find out
who is responsible for any given domain.
NOTE: MDNS and .local Domain Names
The .local top level domain is treated as link-local domain by the resolver.
DNS requests are send as multicast DNS requests instead of normal DNS re-
quests. If you already use the .local domain in your nameserver configuration,
you must switch this option off in /etc/host.conf. Also read the host
.conf manual page.
If you want to switch off MDNS during installation, use nomdns=1 as a boot
parameter.
For more information on multicast DNS, see
.org.
564 Installation and Administration
http://www
http://www.multicastdns