Unable to lookup host registered in hosts file

Unable to lookup host registered in hosts file

[Edi CAHYADI]

Hi All,

I have 2 servers:
hostA: RedHat Linux 2.4.21-40.EL
hostB: HP-UX 10.20

From hostA, I can't lookup hostB even though I put its entry in /etc/hosts file.

root@hostA:/> host hostB
Host hostB not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

Nsswitch.conf is configured to search file first:
root@hostA:/> grep ^hosts /etc/nsswitch.conf
hosts:      files dns

But ping works:
root@hostA:/> ping hostB
PING hostB.domain (<hostB's IP>) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from hostB.domain (<hostB's IP>): icmp_seq=0 ttl=254 time=0.208 ms
64 bytes from hostB.domain (<hostB's IP>): icmp_seq=1 ttl=254 time=0.231 ms

--- hostB.domain ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 received, 0% packet loss, time 1011ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.208/0.219/0.231/0.018 ms, pipe 2

Can anybody tell me why is that so, and how to solve it such that host lookup can work just like nslookup in HP Unix?

Regards,
Edi

Re: Unable to lookup host registered in hosts file

[Adam T. Bowen]

Hi,

Edi CAHYADI wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I have 2 servers:
> hostA: RedHat Linux 2.4.21-40.EL
> hostB: HP-UX 10.20
> 
>>From hostA, I can't lookup hostB even though I put its entry in /etc/hosts file.

Commands like host, dig and nslookup are DNS lookup utilities and so
don't use the configuration defined in /etc/nsswitch.conf.  The switch
file is used to define different ways to find host names (amongst other
things) of which DNS is just one.

Cheers

Adam