On Tue, 20 Feb 2018, at 19:42, Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 07:36:49PM +0000, Jeremy Nicoll wrote:
> > Do you mean when someone outside the LAN is trying to connect to my > > machine? > > No. It's for when you try to look up a hostname without a domain. > > For example, if your local area network uses "Greek gods" as its hostname > theme, and your machine is named "hermes", you might try to "ping zeus" > and see if it's up. > > In this case, "zeus" has no domain name attached to it, so the values in > the /etc/resolv.conf file (search and/or domain) will be used instead. > > Suppose your /etc/resolv.conf contains this: > > search pantheon.gods > nameserver 10.20.30.40 > > Then your "zeus" gets turned into "zeus.pantheon.gods", and will be looked > up in DNS (using the recursive resolver at 10.20.30.40). > > (Unless of course it was already found in /etc/hosts or however you have > configured your local /etc/nsswitch.conf to behave.) Ah... light is dawning. (Probably a god has created another world.) I've only done pinging of other machines on the LAN before (using either Windows or RISC OS) with static machine addresses & named pcs defined in each pc's /etc/hosts or equivalent. -- Jeremy Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
