useful os x dns tricks

here’s a slick little tip that i discovered on a mailing list today.

the OSX resolver is more flexible than i initially gave it credit for. in lieu of running dnsmasq or something along those lines if you want to have selective resolution of DNS for different domains or use alternate name servers you can override this behavior within the /etc/resolver directory by providing per domain resolve.conf files.

doubly useful if you want to probe to a destination when you’re allegedly offline due to being placed behind a less than cluefully deployed walled garden.