Many of the Apple programs and services will honor NetInfo over /etc/services. The same thing goes for DNS stuff like /etc/resolv.conf so you really need to read up on how OS X handles network services, otherwise you'll end up in a odd greyzone where you are letting NetInfo handle some things and the standard unix-ish /etc/ files handle other things. Not good... My best advice is this, go to this URL: http://www.apple.com/server/documentation/ ... the docs there will be helpful but the best one is the one on "OS X Command Line Administration". That PDF will explicitly cover DNS start/stop but you may need one of the other guides to explain how to configure DNS in the first place. Much depends on if you are doing this via the GUI or the command-line. There are nice GUI tools for adding external DNS servers to your configuraiton. The command line methods exist but are a bit more cryptic. Regards, Chris Nnabugwu, Ike (NIH/NIAMS) wrote: > I have a head node running 10.3.9 and six cluster nodes that I am working on > setting up. To have the head node and cluster communicate in the private > network, I have created /etc/hosts with entries i.e. 10.0.0.1 node01 etc, > and have enabled dhcp. But I do not know how to setup dns to use external > dns.Any pointer is appreciated. > -- Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org> Independent life science IT & informatics consulting Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193 PGP KeyID: 83D4310E Yahoo IM: craffi Web: http://bioteam.net