This morning at a friend's house we saw an unusual situation I hope someone
can explain.  This is on one computer out of a number running on the LAN.
The connections are a mix of wired and wireless but all through a Linksys
WRT54GL running HyperWRT 2.1b1 + Thibor15c.  Dnsmasq on the router is
enabled and providing dhcp services, local DNS and DNS passthrough.  This is
the 5th house at which we have installed this setup.  This issue is only a
problem for the one machine (call it hplaptop though any names listed here
are fake) at this 5th house.  in a terminal on hplaptop (running Ubuntu 6.10
):

   - ping hpdesktop gives message of ping: unknown host hpdesktop
   - tracepath and traceroute6 give the same message
   - nslookup and dig both show hpdesktop at 192.168.1.109
   - all other machines on the LAN are able to ping hpdesktop by name

BTW, the name hpdesktop was new (changed this morning).  Host and lmhost
files were cleaned for all machines and machines rebooted.  The dhcp client
table on the router shows all machines and their names (not important except
to show that all machines were including their names in the dhcp request).
It would appear that on hplaptop, the name resolution used by ping,
tracepath, and traceroute is NOT being done through a DNS call.  Any clues
would be appreciated.

-- 
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.  - Dr. Seuss