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10.3.7. The Domain Name System
All these applications need DNS services to match IP addresses to host names and vice versa. A DNS server does not know all the IP addresses in the world, but networks with other DNS servers which it can query to find an unknown address. Most UNIX systems can run named, which is part of the BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) package distributed by the Internet Software Consortium. It can run as a stand-alone caching nameserver, which is often done on Linux systems in order to speed up network access.
Your main client configuration file is /etc/resolv.conf, which determines the order in which Domain Name Servers are contacted:
search somewhere.org nameserver 192.168.42.1
nameserver 193.74.208.137
search somewhere.org nameserver 192.168.42.1
nameserver 193.74.208.137