Name Resolution Problems In Suse 10.3

I have several comps on a LAN. Gateway is SmoothWall. I visited their forums, and they suggested that I come here.

I edited the hosts in my /etc/hosts file under smoothwall, and directed my suse computer(s) to use DNS at gateway address. After a fresh install of opensuse 10.3, I can ping any computer with plain hostname like:

ping anarchy

After doing all the updates, I can no longer ping. Host unreachable. The solution seems to be to add a trailing "dot" at the end of the name

ping anarchy.

This solution irks me to no end. I am aware of some suggested workarounds, like adding "anarchy" to my LOCAL /etc/hosts file, but this requires it to be added to all suse boxes. I'd like to better understand the issue, in addition to fixing it. What's causing this, and Why did this happen when I updated? Like I said before, fresh install of suse 10.3 hadn't this issue.

Felipe

Not enough information. Is the message really "host unreachable'? If the DNS resolution failed, then it would be unknown host, not host unreachable. Host unreachable suggests that the name does map to an IP address, but probably not the one you expect. What you need to do is work out what anarchy and anarchy. resolve to.

host anarchy
host anarchy.

host anarchy
anarchy.site has address 208.67.217.132
host anarchy.
anarchy has address 192.168.0.69

My primary DNS is my gateway (smoothwall). Smoothwalls DNS uses openDNS (thus the openDNS IP address above)

I opened yast, and looked into /etc/sysconfig. I searched for "dns" and "dhcp". I was unsuccessful in finding the word "site" anywhere (notice the appended fictitious domain name above [anarchy.site]). All GNU computers in LAN have domain set to "fulloffacts.com" (i own that domain, it shouldn't matter for this problem [i guess]). I tried searching in "value" for the word "site" but didn't find anything.

As a comparison, Linux Mint (ubuntu) shows this when I type the commands you suggested

host anarchy
anarchy has address 192.168.0.69
host anarchy.
anarchy. has address 192.168.0.69

Hosts file on smoothwall looks like:

127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.0.1 smoothwall.fulloffacts.com smoothwall
192.168.0.200 rubens.fulloffacts.com rubens
192.168.0.69 anarchy.fulloffacts.com anarchy
192.168.0.197 suse-amd.fulloffacts.com suse-amd
[/b]

I tried adding some fictitous hostnames to my /etc/hosts file in smoothwall, for testing purposes. I restarted the DNS server in smoothwall, and pinged the fake names. suse box gave same errors as above, Mint box worked as expected (desired?)

I did a

host anarchy.site

and got NXDOMAIN as expected. What does your /etc/resolv.conf contain? Maybe it has

search site ...

which would cause the search to try anarchy, then anarchy.site.

I removed the "domain site" from /etc/resolv.conf and that solved it (at least from GNU clients, windows clients are another matter . . .). The only line in my /etc/resolv.conf is

nameserver 192.168.0.1

Yast adds that stupid line for some reason....

I removed the "domain site" from /etc/resolv.conf and that solved it (at least from GNU clients, windows clients are another matter . . .). The only line in my /etc/resolv.conf is

nameserver 192.168.0.1

Yast adds that stupid line for some reason....
[/b]

The default 'domain site' got placed in the /etc/resolv.conf because this value was left default during setup, and the default is 'site'.

It's common practice to add your primary local domain(s) as search site.
The idea is that with this applied you don't have to add the dns prefix but only the hostname to get names in your local domain resolved (e.g. server1). Everything outside the search site then has to be specified by it's full domain name (e.g. server2.hp.com)

But it is probably an idea to not let YaST write the default example as search domain. Strange though that it only started to form a problem after updating (probably a bind update).

Cheers,
Wj

I removed the "domain site" from /etc/resolv.conf and that solved it (at least from GNU clients, windows clients are another matter . . .). The only line in my /etc/resolv.conf is

nameserver 192.168.0.1

Yast adds that stupid line for some reason....
[/b]

If your machines are getting the IP config via DHCP, then the "stupid reason" that YaST is adding it is because your DHCP server (Smoothwall?) has been told to send it. So removing it from /etc/resolv.conf is no fix, it will just return next time the lease is renewed. And your Windows clients would suffer the same problem. Fix the problem at the origin.

If your machines are getting the IP config via DHCP, then the "stupid reason" that YaST is adding it is because your DHCP server (Smoothwall?) has been told to send it. So removing it from /etc/resolv.conf is no fix, it will just return next time the lease is renewed. And your Windows clients would suffer the same problem. Fix the problem at the origin. [/b]

I don't know. You could be right. We'll see after the next lease what happens to resolv.conf