AIX Tip of the Week

AIX Tip of the Week: Changing DNS Search Order

Audience: AIX Administrators

Date: July 30, 1999

By default, AIX resolves TCP/IP host names and addresses in the following order:

  1. DNS
  2. NIS
  3. /etc/hosts.

There are situations where you can improve performance and availability by reordering the search order. Here are two methods for changing the default search order in AIX: The first is to specify the order in the configuration file, /etc/netsvc.conf. The second is to set the NSORDER environment variable.

See the AIX documentation for details.