Hello,

We have a client host under cfengine called strawberry, and it is not the only client for cfengine. Everything was running smooth, before one day I started to receive the following message:

It is now looking for a "host.local", that is strawberry.local.
The message is exactly the same in the /var/log/syslog. I cannot remember if and what modifications into config files or into the networking setup I introduced, but I dug through all config files I could think of and compare the network setup of strawberry to other clients, but could not find the problem. Does anyone have an idea of how should I proceed to establish the source of the ".local" addition?

I can execute 'cfrun' on te server side and there are no complaints about strawberry.
I can also execute 'cfagent -q -K' on the client side.

".local" is used by avahi for the mdns service. How is strawberry listing in the cfengine config files. Is it listed in /etc/hosts?

What is the hosts: line in /etc/nsswitch?

It is listed in /etc/cfengine/cfrun.hosts as: strawberry.at.our-domain.de

No, it is not listed on the server side's /etc/hosts.

This is how it looks on strawberry:
This is how it looks on the server side:
Does it mean that I should change that line on strawberry with dns being first?

The hosts: entry looks ok. Both should be tried.

Make sure you have the libraries, libnss_files and libnss_dns in /lib/ or /lib64/.

Does "getent hosts strawberry.at.our-domain.de" return an IP address?
Check if the strawberry host is listed in the dns server.

I'm assuming that you use cfengine to configure a number of hosts and strawberry is the only one with a problem. I think that cfengine couldn't resolve the hostname and tried hostname.local as a fall back, to use Zeroconf. You don't use mdns (zeroconf) so this failed. I think the real problem is why it didn't resolve normally before strawberry.local was tried.

If other hosts not in /etc/hosts resolve OK, then the problem may be elsewhere and not on the server. You could add strawberry to /etc/hosts in the meantime so cfengine updates it.

It maybe completely unrelated: is there an entry 127.0.0.2 in /etc/hosts for the system - I hit a similar effect with GridEngine as this entry was suddenly added to /etc/hosts until I removed it again.

Using "find" one could search for altered config files in /etc/ or for cf-engine dated between when there wasn't a problem, and when it started, according to the logs.

Thank you. Will do that now.

Meanwhile, I modified the following line on the client side from
to
and no further "strawberry.local" messages were received.

Thanks for helping out.

In the past, I had noted that I could find a local host on my LAN, not in /etc/hosts, by adding .local, but when I just tried it yesterday it didn't work. Reading the manpage for avahi_dns or msdns, it says that it only uses the link local (zeroconf) address range, so you would never use it anyway. Removing msdns or msdns_minimal from nsswitch.conf won't do any harm. Only hosts on the LAN that don't use DHCP or have an IP address configured would have such IP address.

If the strawberry host is being configured by cfengine, I think you got it licked.