I am running Solaris 2.6 Server on a Sparc 10 and I was wondering how I can manually specify a DNS server to resolve hostnames. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
And also I have created a file in the /etc dir named defaultrouter and added th IP address of my router, but when I ping another computer on a seperate network it replies with something like "network unreachable from gateway X.X.X.X " where "X.X.X.X" is the IP address of my Unix machine...not the router. I was wondering if there is a command that will allow me to view all of my network settings such as IP Address, Default Gatway, DNS Servers, etc....

Put a line in /etc/resolv.conf like this:

nameserver X.X.X.X

(put in your nameserver's IP address instead of X's)


You may specify more than one "nameserver" line in the resolv.conf file.

You might have to restart networking to get your /etc/defaultrouter file read in. Alternately, use the "route" command to add a default gateway. Something like:

route add default gw X.X.X.X


"netstat -r" will show your routes. "ifconfig" will show your IP address.

[Edited by PxT on 05-07-2001 at 11:02 AM]

Doeas this also apply to Linux distributions such as Fedora , I'd like to know this because I want to use the opendns servers instead of my ISPS dns servers?

Yes all *NIX based resolvers (as far as a i know all OS resolvers) prefer 2 nameserver entries. You may however have more.

I created the resolv.conf file in the /etc/ directory and added the line:
nameserver x.x.x.x

but I still cannot get any name resolution. I can access public websites via IP address, but not hostname.....weird!

Did you add the name of your local hostname to the /etc/hosts file?

You did replace the x's with the IP address of your nameserver, right? The line should look something like:

nameserver 192.168.0.1

replace the IP with that of your DNS server.