Yes, one person with time on his hands told me to RTFFAQ, but I did get many
useful suggestions (and many of them arrived even before my own message came
back to me from the list). Many thanks to everyone for the help.
My problem turns out to be a "feature" of SunOS 4.x. DNS doesn't work
properly without NIS (and I was really curious why there were so many
entried in "/etc/hosts" on one of the machines). The fix is to rebuild the
resolver libraries. There are patches on the net. However, I'll just
update the hosts file for the short time the systems will be here.
Special thanks to Tom Jordan and Frank Pardo for pointing me in the right
direction.
Original question follows:
> There are a couple of people who've arrived at my site to work for a couple
> of weeks, and they brought their SunOS workstations with them. The only Sun
> system I've been supporting runs Solaris, and I've forgotten everything I
> know about SunOS. I've run into a couple of problems on one of the systems.
>
> First, the system can't do a reverse DNS lookup of its own address. I can
> enter nslookup hostname, and I'll get the correct IP address of the host.
> If I enter nslookup IP-address, the IP address shows up as both the host
> name and the address. Reverse lookup for this machine works from other
> systems, and this machine can do a reverse lookup of other systems.
>
> Also, I can't ping other systems by name. I get "unknown host", even if I
> give a fully qualified host name. Pinging using IP addresses works fine.
> There seems to be a configuration problem somewhere, but I can't find it.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:57 CDT