[Info-vax] DNS issues with OpenVMS

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2023-04-18 13:11:52 +0000, Single Stage to Orbit said:

> I have installed and configured OpenVMS x86.
> DHCP working well. Picks up IP address quite happily, configures
> gateway to the router happily.
> One thing I can't figure out is how to get it to hand off DNS lookups
> to my router which I need to resolve machine names on my network.
> I can use either serial over TCP/IP or SSH into the machine using IP
> addresses quite easily.
> Any ideas?

Go static. Or, well, let us know what you find.

I've never gotten OpenVMS working reliably with DHCP. Yeah, it 
sorta-kinda works, probably works well enough to be used as a 
workstation, but I always end up chasing something gone weird or gone 
wrong when deploying OpenVMS as a server with DHCP addressing.

Accordingly, I always set OpenVMS with a static IP address, and (as 
needed) set the DHCP server to recognize and reserve the IP address for 
the OpenVMS server MAC address(es), on the off chance OpenVMS makes a 
DHCP request.

Within TCPIP$CONFIG, set your DNS server address(es) to the local DNS 
server(s).

Working in your favor here for DHCP, OpenVMS is fairly limited about 
its network connection security, which means most network services 
won't be failing with SSL errors if the reverse DNS is wrong. (The 
connections should fail if reverse DNS is wrong, of course.)

Microsoft integrates DNS and DHCP via DDNS within Windows Server 
networking, but DDNS setup can be a separate step with other DHCP 
servers, and DDNS is not available with some DHCP servers.  BIND does 
have DDNS support. I don't know off-hand if the now-deprecated ISC DHCP 
server supports DDNS, if you're using that.

I'm not aware of any DCL-level tooling that allows easy access to the 
lease information, either.

OpenVMS TCP/IP Services DHCP client requires the following "files" from 
the DHCP server, too: nets., netmasks., dhcpcap, .ddnskeys, and 
server.pcy.



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