On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Matthew Dalton wrote: > Sort of... > Strictly speaking, DNS is not required for internet access. More > accurately, an end user does not have to set up DNS on his/her machine > to enable him/her to go onto the internet. The internet service > providers provide one or more of their own DNS servers for the end user > to use.
Right. I think what we have here is a matter of confusion over terminology. I said 'DNS is only necessary if you go on the Internet' which, I think, is pretty much true (minus the pathological case of putting everybody in /etc/hosts). It isn't necessary to set up a whole DNS server for that (though you may as well as it will speed things up) but it is necessary to 'set up DNS' - in the sense that you need to sort out how your system will communicate with whatever DNS server it's using.
