I am having an acute problem with my home setup.

I have my home configured that all the machines route though a slackware 10 server which connects to a netopia router. The server runs a simple set of iptables and default route is to the netopia which acts as a forwarding dns.

All the machines in my house are able to connect to the internet and work perfectly. My server on the otherhand refuses to perform host name look ups. I can traceroute to google's ip address but i cannot traceroute www.google.ie

I entered both my netopia's address and both ISP dns servers in the resolv.conf

I you have any thoughts on something i am missing i'd appreciate any comments. Thanks in advance.

I have noticed that named is not running on my process list. I think this might have something to do with it but i am not sure. Hope this helps

I found the answer to my own question. Thought i'd just finish off this thread with the solution i found.

I found my solution at this site
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/DNS-HOWTO-3.html

Toward the end i read that the nsswitch.conf file controls the resolver as to how domain names will be accessed. All i had to do was add

hosts= files dns

or something similar. I hope this is of help to someone struggling up the same path as myself.