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Date:      Thu, 06 Jun 2002 21:37:02 -0400
From:      Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
To:        Robert <robbak@comnorth.com.au>
Cc:        FreeBSD Support <freeBSD-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: OT - Some Name strangeness
Message-ID:  <3D000E3E.4010601@potentialtech.com>
References:  <001c01c20dc1$b19ef8b0$fa6318ac@swegg>

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Robert wrote:
> I recently (as noted in other post) been involved in a telstra (australia)
> bigpond installation.
> 
> the strangness i have seen is in the names fo the pop and smtp server names.
> 
> pop mail comes from pop-mail (No .bigpond.com.) and mail goes to mail-hub
> (again, not a FQDN). I didn't think that too strange - the DNS could treat
> them as local names, or could be hacked to supply the ip addresses from
> these apparently invalid names.
> 
> However, I became competely confused when these names continued to work
> after I installed my BSD router and changed to it's DNS server. Also,
> nslookup canot resolve these names, no matter where i send the request.
> 
> What is happening? how is this working???

It seems to me that most systems will append their domain name to the host
name if it's not fully qualified.  i.e.:
My hostname is me.domain.com
I'm trying to resolve smtp-server and it fails, so I try smtp-server.domain.com.
Would that explain what's happening?
I believe this is a standard action for any resolver library to take.
nslookup won't do it, however.  nslookup only attempts to resolve exactly what
you tell it to.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technology
http://www.potentialtech.com


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