ITEM: F8236L

DNS name resolution may impact remote printing

Question:

Customer wants to print from one system to another. The print client
is not in the DNS domain. The print server is a secondary to a DNS
domain. The DNS secondary is an HP and the DNS primary is an AIX machine.
The print client is running AIX 3.2.4 and the DNS primary is an AIX
3.2.4 machine. The print client is on an entirely different network
sepearated by at least 3 Cisco routers. There is no error message and
the print queue on the RISC System/6000 says that it is sending and
then the entire queue drops. The hosts.equiv on the HP recognizes the
client by name and the fully qualified domain name (client.domain.com.).

However, when one uses nslookup on the HP the name is recognized but
not the PTR record. The nslookup query for recognizing the inverse
address requires one to enter set q=ptr and then put in the ip address.
Even this way the record fails. HP is hard-wired to use DNS for name
resolution and not investigate the /etc/hosts file if the DNS lookup
fails. Therefore, the HP will not service the remote print request
since the inverse address name resolution is failing. 

Investigation of the primary shows that the record is there in both
the hosts file and the rev file. We changed the format of the named.rev
file on the primary to add the $ORIGEN of the print client and its name:

   $ORIGIN "network-address".in-addr.arpa.
   "host"   IN PTR client.domain.com.

where "network-address" is the network portion of the ip address and "host" 
is the host address portion of the ip address.

Then we updated the serial number of both the named and the data files and
and issued refresh -s named on the DNS primary and secondary.

However, the zone transfer did not occur on the DNS secondary. To see
if we could force the zone transfer we killed named on the HP secondary
and then restarted the named daemon on the HP after we had renamed the
DNS named.data and named.rev files to respective backup names. The zone
transfer still did not occur. Next we tried issuing:
/etc/named.xfer - z domain-name -f /usr/namedb/named.rev
to try and cause a zone transfer for the specific named.rev file.

To circumvent this failure to do zone transfers we ftp'd the files 
from the primary nameserver to the secondary nameserver. After this we 
stopped and started named (using kill since HP does not support stopsrc
and startsrc). At this point, the PTR record was found using nslookup
and the remote print jobs could be succesfully transferred from the
print client to the print server. 

In order for a remote print job to work using DNS the data file and the 
rev files must both resolve the name the same way. The secondary was
looking in it's files first and not resolving the name correctly. Thus
the DNS files needed to be fixed prior to resolving the remote print
problem.




Support Line: DNS name resolution may impact remote printing ITEM: F8236L

Dated: January 1994 Category: N/A

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