Domain Name has defaulted
 

I am part of a class that is using Fedora 14 and recently discovered that my account has defaulted to localhost domain, meaning that I am no longer part of the the class' domain. My /etc/sysconfig/network folder shows the proper settings for the the host/domain name which is "cislab.local."
My professor also seems to be baffled by the situation.
Is there a way to revert back to the proper domain?
Does anyone know what could have caused this problem?

Thanks

We were able to figure out the problem:
At some point I had deleted the settings for the NIC and it was an easy fix adding the device again.

Well, to be honest, it may not matter much. Though, I'll defer to any networking experts that come along.

As far as linux is concerned, the only things it cares about are your IP address, your netmask, gateway, and DNS settings.

If all of the above are correct, it doesn't really matter what "domain" your machine belongs to. Any requests leaving your machine will resolve hostnames through your DNS. Any machines that need to communicate with your machine will resolve your machine's name through DNS as well. In other words, if your DNS server has the right name-to-IP database, there won't be any communication problems.

Now, that said...

I ran into problems using a LAN with ".local" suffix. It turns out that some (well intentioned?) developers for the Avahi project trigger on the ".local" and try to use mDNS name resolution instead of traditional DNS for those names. This caused me some grief. I had a properly configured local DNS server running, but one machine continually had problems resolving internal hostnames: because avahi was stepping in and trumping normal DNS resolution.

This may not be your problem, but it might be worth a look.

If avahi is installed, you can try to uninstall it or modify the order of entries in your /etc/nsswitch.conf file (or wherever it is for Fedora) to remove mDNS or have it take place after normal DNS.

EDIT:
Hah! Or it could be a simple missing file ;)

Dark Helmet - Thank you for taking the time to reply, I appreciate it! Yes, it seemed hopeless at first until I realized that we had messed with the NIC and Ethernet settings in order to set up a private network for an OpenVPN lab. Occam's Razor, am I right? haha
Thanks again!