SUMMARY: Problems with the naming service....

Dear list members,

thanks for all replies I got!

Most answers pointed out that my nsswitch.conf is not configured properly:

hosts:      nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

What I forgot to mention is that I am running our NIS in "DNS-forwarding mode",
in /var/yp/Makefile I defined B=-b. So, name resolving was working and is
working again, though I haven't done any changes to the system. 

Nevertheless, there was a consensus about not using nis at all for name
resolving:

hosts:      files dns    (or similar solutions)

Another suggestion was shutting down nscd, because "it's evil". I will do that.

Last but not least it was pointed out that nslookup is not a good way
to test if name resolving is working or not since it "resolves names differently
from the rest of the system." A better way of testing it is
 getent host <hostname>

Again, thanks for all replies. The next time I have problems I will put all the
suggsstion to work....

thanks to:
Reggie Beavers, Martin Hepworth, Bertrand Hutin, John Riddoch, Ed Rolison,
Lieven Marchand, Rafael Angarita, Joe Bernard, Steve Maher, Jay Lessert,
Christopher Barnard, Fabrice Guerini.

Original Post:

> Dear list members,
> 
> I have a rather odd problem here and I hope you have some suggestions about it,
> because I almost lost hope *sigh* ....
> 
> Our group has a small Sun cluster that is quite independent of most services of
> our netprovider, a research site for high energy physics. One of the services we
> use, though, is the naming service. And that one is giving us a lot of headaches
> recently.
> 
> Like today: All our machines can't access any web page or remote WS outside via
> the machine name. I get a connection, though, if I use the IP number. Weirdly,
> nslookup works fine and resolves all the names that won;t work put in ssh or
> lynx or netscape or .... To make the confusion perfect, our Linux WS has no
> problems at all, though it uses the same DNS.
> 
> Probably this is a problem of our Provider. But since the only infected machines
> in our subnet are our Sun WS, I wonder if there is anything I could do about it.
> 
> We are not running named/in.named and as far as I can tell, the DNS is not
> cached. We use NIS, and the 'hosts' line in the nsswitch.conf looks like this:
> 
> hosts:      nis [NOTFOUND=return] files 
> 
> I am not sure which version of the resolvlib is installed, the latest kernel
> patch we are using is 105858-15 (I know, -16 is out and highly recommended, but
> right now the machines are VERY busy...)
> 
> If you need more information, let me know. Thanks in advance,
> 
> Levent

---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Levent Demiroers                kaa.desy.de/people/Demiroers.html
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers