Problem with local network

[Tim]

On Fri, 2006-01-13 at 18:50 +0000, Chris Jones wrote:

> My hosts file is:
> 
> # Do not remove the following line, or various programs
> # that require network functionality will fail.
> 127.0.0.1    bilbo.stow-jones.local localhost.localdomain    localhost
> 192.168.0.3    bilbo.stow-jones.local bilbo
> 192.168.0.2    gandalf.stow-jones.local    gandalf
> 192.168.0.4    frodo.stow-jones.local    frodo

That "following line" should have been:
127.0.0.1  localhost.localdomain    localhost
Not as you had it (with the bilbo.stow-jones.local).

*And*, you're setting yourself up for problems trying to give the name 
bilbo.stow-jones.local address to both 127.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.3.

If you have LAN interfaces, which you appear to do, then there's no
reason try and apply a local machine address to the loopback.  Only do
that if you have no interfaces and want your machine to know itself as
something other than localhost.localdomain.

Although that's a different problem to what you've brought up, it might
be a cause of other problems that bite you, particularly if you've done
the same trick on each PC.

> When I ping to any of the PC's I get the following:-
> [root at bilbo ~]# ping -c4 frodo
> ping: unknown host frodo

You mentioned that you've checked your /etc/resolv.conf file, but you
haven't told us what's in there.  Perhaps you expect something different
than what's needed.  I'd expect it to have one or the other of the
following lines in it:

search stow-jones.local
domain stow-jones.local

Your /etc/nsswitch.conf looks like it's set up to query your hosts file
before anything else, so it *should* be checking it.

Trying to use dig to test things will only help you if you have your
local DNS server configured with your machine addresses (and
your /etc/resolv.conf file starts off with your local DNS server
addresses instead of remote ISP ones), it won't pay any attention to the
hosts file (neither do some other things, which is just one reason I
stopped playing with my hosts file and did things properly with a DNS
server).

-- 
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