I have a Windows 7 machine that I have an installation of Ubuntu 10.10 via VMware and am having an issue with pinging by hostname thorugh the VM. From the Windows 7 machine I can ping by name without any issue but not with the VM. I have the VM as bridged so it is pulling all the network stuff via DHCP including the correct DNS servers. I can ping all the DNS servers and host without any issue. I have verified my /etc/resolv.conf entries are all correct. If I run nslookup via the VM it says:

I have also verified that AVAHI is running to cache the DNS stuff and still no success. Any Suggestions?

Can it be you have a firewall active on the Windows machine?
Are you pinging just a hostname or a fully qualified name? abdc1 or abdc1.some.domain?
Is there a "search" line in /etc/resolv.conf and does it make sense?
Try "dig abdc1" instead of nslookup.
If you start nslookup without any arguments, you should enter interactive mode and it should tell you the nameserver it is using.
You can try another name server by entering "server ip_address"
For instance, server 8.8.8.8 or server 8.8.4.4 to use Google's public name servers.

Something in the above should help you resolve (no pun intended) the problem.

thanks for the reply

I can nslookup outside let say google.com but I cannot resolve hostname locally. I ran a dig against a FQDN and no errors

QUERY 1 ANSWER 1 AUTHORITY 0 ADDITIONAL 0

IPTABLES -nvL is not running. No firewall is running on this VM.

I thought that it may have been something in the /etc/nsswitch.conf since it is using AVAHI

Name Service Switch Configuration

The order in which your system selects a method of resolving hostnames to IP addresses is controlled by the Name Service Switch (NSS) configuration file /etc/nsswitch.conf. As mentioned in the previous section, typically static hostnames defined in the systems /etc/hosts file have precedence over names resolved from DNS. The following is an example of the line responsible for this order of hostname lookups in the file /etc/nsswitch.conf.
it did nothing

Add them to
Kind regards

Can an IP be "Blacklisted" from a DNS server? It is strange how the Windows 7 machine hosting the VM machine can do DNS queries without any issues but the VM which is bridged and has it static ip address cannot. I can query the DNS servers via dig, nslookup. I cannot nmblookup a FQDN but can query via dig and nslookup? I am stumped. I thought I had those entries in /etc/hosts but will check again.

Are these names locally?
Windows uses netbios and wins.
Perhaps that's why windows can resolve them, and linux can't.

Kind regards

For local machine names, the file should look similar to your file in windows.

There are several hundred hosts. To have to put them into the host file would take me forever. ?

I can reverse look up the DNS server using nslookup but ping the host by hostname

Can I add the DNS server name and IP in the /etc/hosts is that what you mean?

Take a look at
http://www.colingodsey.com/resolving...amba-in-linux/

Kind regards

Thanks for the reply, been there done that with /etc/nsswitch.conf

Ok I made progress.

I looked at the /etc/resolv.conf and there wasnt a search entry present only nameserver ip_address
I added that back to the /etc/resolv.conf and now all is well accept I cannot ping FQDN?
So for example I can ping abcd1 but not abcd1.testnetwork.local

So in my /etc/resolv.conf I have

search localhost testnetwork.local
nameserver 1.2.3.4
nameserver 5.6.7.8
??

P.S

excellent references for the newbies like myself:

http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/w...onfiguring_DNS

It appears that I need a Domain testnetwork.local in my /etc/resolv.conf and that will allow me to ping a FQDN withing the domain.

I also looked into AVAHI and the /etc/nsswitch.conf to look at the order of the DNS queries such as:

But all is all everything seems ok. I still need to test that domain entry to see if I can ping the FQDN.

Thanks for all the help.