1 TITLE: Installing dig, nslookup and host
3 AUTHOR: Jim Harris <jim_harris@maxtor.com>
6 How to install the dig, nslookup and host utilities.
13 ------------------------------
15 This hint explains how to install the dig (domain information groper), nslookup
16 and host utilities from ISC BIND version 9 without installing the rest of the
17 package (a full DNS server.) If you prefer to setup a complete DNS server,
18 please see the BIND hint available at
19 http://hints.linuxfromscratch.org/hints/bind.txt.
21 This hint assumes that you already have a valid DNS server to use and a valid
24 Be aware that many, or all, of these utilities are also available under the 4.x
25 and 8.x versions of BIND, however, this installation process will only work
26 with BIND version 9.x due to major changes in the installation process from
27 prior releases of BIND.
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32 For this hint, BIND version 9.2.1 was used, but any version in the 9.x family
33 will most likely work.
35 The source for BIND can be obtained from:
36 ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind9/9.2.1/bind-9.2.1.tar.gz
38 Building and Installing
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41 Because we are only installing the dig, nslookup and host utilities, we can
42 save time by building only the libraries required by these binaries, thus, the
43 steps taken to build and install will vary slightly from a standard configure /
44 make / make install process.
46 $ tar xvfz bind-9.2.1.tar.gz
48 $ ./configure --prefix=/usr
50 * A note on FHS compliance. I have changed the default installation
51 location from /usr/local to /usr. Many people would argue that this is not FHS
52 compliant because it is an optional package, however, I feel that these three
53 utilities are a critical part of any GNU/Linux installation. If you feel
54 differently, you can optionally run ./configure without the --prefix argument
55 to install these utilities to their default locations under /usr/local.
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66 All three utilities try to use the name servers and search paths found in
67 /etc/resolv.conf unless you tell them to do otherwise at invocation. If you do
68 not have a valid resolv.conf, dig and host may appear to hang.
70 An example of a minimum /etc/resolv.conf:
72 search <domain suffix of ISP>
73 nameserver <ip of dns server>
74 nameserver <ip of secondary dns server>