*BSD News Article 90459


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From: sitaram@diac.com (Sitaram Chamarty)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Nslookup and host versus ftp, ping, etc. - strange problem
Date: Thu, 06 Mar 1997 04:09:36 GMT
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My apologies for the long post, but there's a peculiar problem I can't
figure out:

I have a FreeBSD 2.1.6 machine called "sitagw2k" from which "ping
sitagw2k", "ftp sitagw2k", "telnet..." etc work fine.  But "host
sitagw2k" and "nslookup sitagw2k" don't work.  I dont have "named"
running - we have a gateway/firewall machine which is used as a
nameserver as well as our link to the outside world.  That part is
fine: "nslookup ftp.freebsd.org" returns 165.113.58.253 and
wcarchive.cdrom.com, for instance.

So I have the peculiar situation that these commands can find others,
but not the machine on which they are running!

Details of configuration:

This is FreeBSD 2.1.6 on an unused P75 that nobody claimed - it is
*not* possible to sanctify its existence by including its name and IP
address in the NIS maps because if I attempt to do that I might lose
the machine (don't ask :-)  So I always refer to it by its IP address,
and everything works fine (FTP server, X server, Samba, is all I've
loaded on it so far).

But I loaded apache today, and got an unknown host error when
attempting to "http://iii.jjj.kkk.lll/~sitaram" (where the iii stuff
is the IP address).  The error I got was that "sitagw2k.mydomain.com"
was not found - it had resolved the IP address into a name, then
failed on the name lookup!

I spent about 2 hours trying to figure this out - during which time I
found out about host and nslookup!  I'd never had occasion to use them
before...I figure if I can get them to recognise "sitagw2k", apache
will too.

Other details: (1) "named" is not running.  (2) /etc/hosts contain the
127.0.0.1 (localhost) entry, as well as the sitagw2k entry with my IP
address on it.  (3) resolv.conf has our "gateway"s IP address as a
nameserver.

Any help, pointers, or suggestions much appreciated!  I'm at the end
of my tether.  I'd be happy to supply any other details that might be
pertinent that I have missed.

Sitaram