Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 472565
authconfig --enablenis breaks DNS
Last modified: 2008-11-24 15:09:12 EST
authconfig-5.3.21-3.el5.x86_64 option "--enablenis" changes /etc/nsswitch.conf to read "hosts: files nis dns". Notice how by adding the "nis" entry, this configures DNS to query NIS before querying any name servers. This behaviour is surprising. As a long time NIS user and administrator I have never ever used NIS to resolve DNS queries. This actually happens to misbehave. I see programs stuck inside gethostbyname(), with gethostbyname() in turn being stuck trying to make NIS calls. (This is a no-bug - do not use NIS to do DNS!) RHEL4 does not seem to have this problem. I see most of my SL4 machines read "hosts: files dns", so at least some older versions of authconfig did not have this problem. Anyhow, I see no mention of any of this in authconfig documentation, authconfig rpm changelog or in Red Hat bugzilla. To undo this unwanted change, run this sed script: sed 's/^hosts:.*/hosts: files dns/' -i /etc/nsswitch.conf K.O.
As far as I know this was always the case - even in the RHEL-4 authconfig that if you enable nis for user information it will add it to hosts: in nsswitch.conf. So this is no regression. But in the 5.3 update of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there will be a new enhancement of authconfig that it will support --enablepreferdns option which will make it to put dns just after files before any other services such as nis.