scutil enables much more fine-grained control over the current network configuration. scselect provides a list of defined network locations (as in the Network preference pane) and allows you to choose between them. The command-line tools to interface with the configuration daemon are scselect and scutil. The host command would read my hacked-up /etc/nf, but smarter DNS lookups would query the network configuration database from configd. ,br>The answer? OS X has a daemon called configd, which magically collects configuration information, sends notifications, and maintains a dynamic database of the current settings. I thought the smarter option would be in the NetInfo database, except on my machine, I had no resolver configuration hiding there. Sometimes /etc/nf would be magically restored to its original configuration. Re-writing /etc/nf resulted in a system where a DNS lookup with host would work, but dig and ping would not. In the course of setting up a VPN package ( openvpn) on OS X, I had to set the DNS resolution configuration dynamically from a shell script.Īs of (at least) 10.3, /etc/nf (or /var/run/nf) is NOT the place to do this.

There's a lot of conflicting information about how to set networking information (such as DNS resolution configuration) from the terminal.

Show dns servers mac terminal