On 1/18/08, Joe Greenseid <jgreen at thunderlizards.net> wrote: > Can anyone explain the following behavior to me? > /snip from the DNS and BIND bible :-) talking about the "options" statement in resolve.conf The second setting you can modify is ndots, which sets the minimum number of dots a domain name argument must have for the resolver to look it up beforeapplying the search list. By default, one or more dots will do; this is equivalent to ndots:1. The resolver first tries the domain name as typed as long as the name has any dots in it. You can raise the threshold if you believe your users are more likely to type partial domain names that will need the search list applied. For example, if your local domain name is mit.edu and your users are accustomed to typing: % ftp prep.ai and having mit.edu automatically appended to produce prep.ai.mit.edu, you may want to raise ndots to two so that your users won't unwittingly cause lookups to the root name servers for names in the top-level ai domain. You could do this with: options ndots:2 this would mean that in order to use FQDNs then you would need to use a trailing "." to specify them which can upset some clients. hth mike