On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Dazed_75 wrote: > Josh, the first problem I have with that solution is that it is 2 years and > 4 ubuntu releases ago. But a good explanation of the issues is buried in > https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/network-configuration.html > > The section I refer to says: > >> 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. >> >> hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 >> >> >> - >> >> *files* first tries to resolve static hostnames located in /etc/hosts. >> >> - >> >> *mdns4_minimal* attempts to resolve the name using Multicast DNS. >> - >> >> *[NOTFOUND=return]* means that any response of notfound by the >> preceeding mdns4_minimal process should be treated as authoritative >> and that the system should not try to continue hunting for an answer. >> - >> >> *dns* represents a legacy unicast DNS query. >> - >> >> *mdns4* represents a Multicast DNS query. >> >> To modify the order of the above mentioned name resolution methods, you >> can simply change the hosts: string to the value of your choosing. For >> example, if you prefer to use legacy Unicast DNS versus Multicast DNS, you >> can change the string in /etc/nsswitch.conf as shown below. >> >> hosts: files dns [NOTFOUND=return] mdns4_minimal mdns4 >> >> Personally, though, I just turn on dnsmasq in my router so that all > machines on the LAN are known by the router and it caches them so a dns > resolution workd both for LAN and WAN name resolution. > > Interesting. I was guessing incorrectly as to why it worked. Regardless it's solved my problem; we'll see if I run into side-affects. Simply turning on dnsmasq isn't an option in my environment. We have a complicated setup of hardware vpn's and some static routes to other offices. Also, I'm not the network guy; just a developer. So.. Happy it's working now but I may have to come back to this topic later.