[TriLUG] How ssh et al resolves domain names...

Brian Henning bhenning at pineinst.com
Tue Aug 27 09:58:35 EDT 2013


Hi Gang,

I think I've brought this topic up before, but it's back to taunt me again.
A snippet from my command line should summarize nicely:

[brian at cheetah ~]$ host mirawall
mirawall has address 192.168.0.106
[brian at cheetah ~]$ ssh mirawall
ssh: mirawall: Name or service not known
[brian at cheetah ~]$ ping mirawall
ping: unknown host mirawall

"mirawall" is a DHCP-assigned host on the local subnet.
dnsmasq provides DHCP and DNS.
"mirawall" is not in the /etc/hosts file, and I don't want it to be.

Why does host(1) know who "mirawall" is, but ssh(1) and ping(8) (among
others) do not?  Shouldn't they all be resolving the hostname the same way?

Is there some config file I need to tweak?  Here's my /etc/resolv.conf:

[brian at cheetah ~]$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script
search nc.rr.com
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 8.8.8.8


Thanks,
~Brian

------------------------------------------------------ 
          Brian Henning, Software Engineer

    /\    Pine Research Instrumentation 
   //\\   2741 Campus Walk Ave, Bldg 100 
  ///\\\  Durham, NC 27705 
 ////\\\\ USA 
    || 
    ||    phone: 919.782.8320 
          fax:   919.782.8323 
          email: bhenning at pineinst.com 
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