How do I resolve subdomain to subdomain.domain.com?

In Unix-like systems, if you open your /etc/resolv.conf file, you will notice that it contains a list of the nameservers to be used for address resolution. It might also, optionally, contain one of two fields: search or domain.

domain

A domain entry could be of the following form:

domain domain.com

This tells the domain name resolver to append domain.com at the end of names which do not end in a . (dot).

search

A search entry could be of the following form:

search domain.com alternativedomain.com

This tells the resolver to first append domain.com for name resolution. If that fails, the resolver moves on to the next search domain (alternativedomain.com), and so on.

NOTE: If both domain and search are used, the one that appears last will be used.

Modifying resolv.conf

If you were to modify the resolv.conf file directly, for domain/search editing, it would be over-written by the OS, due to various reasons (DHCP being the most common). Depending on you OS, there are various utilities available to modify these settings. Go, explore the world wide web!

How to check if your modification works?

You could verify your changes by running the host utility. Your changes would not be reflected if you were to use dig. To make dig work, you could use the +search option. For e.g., dig +search domain.

Creating DNS like entries on your local

Your /etc/hosts could contain an entry like the following:

216.58.220.46 www.google.com

As is apparent from the above line, google.com would be resolved to 216.58.220.46.

How to check if your modification works?

Running the dig or host utility would not work for the /etc/hosts changes. dig and host are meant for DNS lookups, not file lookups. These two utilities do not make use of the gethostbyname system call (which internally checks the /etc/hosts file), which is used by most programs. If you were to open the domain in your web browser, your request should be made to the correct IP address (from the hosts file).