Re: Name lookup question

[Nalin Dahyabhai <nalin redhat com>]

On Thu, May 12, 2005 at 06:58:17PM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 07:53 -0700, Collins, Kevin [MindWorks] wrote:
> > In our environment, we rely heavily in NIS. Our name resolution is
> > configured in nsswitch.conf to use NIS, then hosts file, then DNS
> > (host.conf is also configured this way). We have many short host name
> > aliases in NIS that we use for convenience that are NOT in DNS or
> > local hosts file. From the OS perspective, this all works well. 
> > 
> > If I attempt a ping to one of those aliases, all works well - the name
> > is resolved to IP and the ping succeeds. However, if I attempt to use
> > the nslookup or host command to lookup the alias manually, it fails
> > with a SERVFAIL error.
> 
> nslookup is dns specific... host should work though.
> that sounds like a bug.

I wouldn't expect that -- the host command, like nslookup, is provided
by bind-utils, and in my experience it also only queries DNS.

If you need to go through nsswitch, it's probably simplest to pass the
hostname or address to "getent hosts".

Nalin