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[LUG] Dummy domain names and other DNS questions

 

I'm currently staying at a friends house. They have the standard shared internet setup- a router managing all the dhcp and dns. However, I came across in interesting problem the other day. Almost all applications work fine (firefox, thunderbird, ping), but when I tried to use dig or nslookup it complained about resolv.conf having a bad format. I checked and found that it had the usual- two nameserver lines and one "search" line. But the problem was that the search line was blank, since they had not specified a domain name in the router configuration.

Are blank domains allowed under the dns/dhcp specifications? If not, is there a recognised 'dummy domain'?

Also, I have an application which for some reason can't communicate with a local process unless the hostname of the machine can be resolved (either by a nameserver or /etc/hosts). I'm sure that's totally broken and that the application should be using localhost. In any case I'm stuck with that for the moment, but I'm not quite sure what I should do here. It's a laptop, and constantly changes IP (or may not have one), so I can't add it's IP to /etc/hosts. For the moment I have added 127.0.0.1 as a second entry with the hostname, but I'm sure I've seen someone mention somewhere that the loopback device should never be attached to the host name, which sounds sensible, but I'm not sure why. Also, what happens if /etc/hosts has 2 lines for the same IP? Does it merge them or does one override the other?

Any thoughts?
Thanks
Simon
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