Solaris provides extensive control over the means of looking up various name services including DNS. If DNS resolution of hostnames has not been setup, the nsswitch.conf file must be configured in addition to resolv.conf.

Once you have configured the DNS client settings in Solaris, you need to alter the /etc/nsswitch.conf file. This name services configuration file controls a variety of lookup types with several services including NIS/NIS+ and LDAP.

To configure your host to perform hostname lookups with DNS, modify the line that starts with hosts: to include the keyword dns. For example, if your /etc/nsswitch.conf file hosts line looks like:

hosts: files


change it to read:

hosts: files dns


The order of keywords on this line indicates the order in which Solaris references the name services. The keyword files represents the /etc/hosts file.