Nsswitch behavior -vs- man page?

Question

I have a question about Solaris 10's /etc/nsswitch.conf
functionality. It seems like it does not work as it use to, say in
Solaris 8 or 9, yet the man page for nsswitch.conf indicates that for
DNS, NIS, and "all other sources" that the DEFAULT criteria should be
"NOTFOUND=continue".
Yet for the past few years it seems I must manually put something like
the lines below in the nsswitch file for "continue" to work
correctly? Is this a bug, or am I completely misunderstanding the man
page and/or how nsswitch REALLY works? Very possible!
hosts: files [NOTFOUND=continue] dns [NOTFOUND=continue] nis
ipnodes: files [NOTFOUND=continue] dns [NOTFOUND=continue] nis
If I use the "default sample file for NIS (/etc/nsswitch.nis) which
may contain something like "hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files" and
yet I want to add DNS, what might the line look like?
I know I have to copy the sample file to the .conf file extension.
Thanks,

Answer 1

Your question is a little fuzzy, but I'll try to answer anyway...
nsswitch.conf file is responsible for specifying the name services that are to be used when trying to find a particular piece of information.
In Solaris, there are 5 possible sources (name services): files, nis, nisplus, dns and ldap.
You may specify multiple (even all) sources to be used. All sources are checked in the order they are written on a line.
Every source may return 4 status values: SUCCESS, NOTFOUND, UNAVAIL or TRYAGAIN.
For every return status, there are 2 possible actions: continue and return. continue means "try the next source", return means "don't look any further". The default action for every status is continue, except for the SUCCESS status, when action is *return", obviously...
One can overwrite the default action for each status, by specifying what action should be taken for any return status.
Let's take for instance this line:
hosts: files dns [NOTFOUND=continue] nis [NOTFOUND=return] ldapThis is interpreted as follows:
- first check "files" (i.e. check /etc/inet/inpnodes, /etc/inet/hosts); no action is specified for any return status, so default actions are in place: if the entry is found on files (SUCCESS), then action is return" , if status is anything else, then action is continue* and next source is checked
- next source is "dns"; if SUCCESS, program will return; if NOTFOUND , then continue to the next source (this is also the default action, but it doesn't matter - this line is just for teaching purposes...); if UNAVAIL (service dns is not configured) or TRYAGAIN (server was too busy to respond to request), then apply default action: *continue"
- next source is nis; if SUCCESS ,then default action (*return*); if NOTFOUND then overwrite default action and return ; so, if the entry is found or not found in nis, the next source (ldap) will not be checked.
and so on....
>
If I use the "default sample file for NIS (/etc/nsswitch.nis) which
may contain something like "hosts: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files" and
yet I want to add DNS, what might the line look like?
{quote}
Well, it depends; suppose you want to check dns after nis and before files. The line may look like this:
{code}
hosts: nis dns files
{code}
The above entry will check dns even if nis returns NOTFOUND.
Hope you got the idea...
kido