DNS resolution issue.

[Benjamin Scott]

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 10:54 AM, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:
> 5) Same for pinging: "gildor" works fine, "gildor.foo.local", not so much.

  That's historically a sign that you haven't configured your DNS
suffix search list properly.  E.g., if all hosts in your org have
names of the form <bar.foo.local.>, then your resolv.conf should have
a line like this in it:

	search foo.local

> ... why "NOTFOUND=return" is a default setting?

  I'm not up on multicast DNS, so I have little clue about the
semantics of <mdns4> and <mdns4_minimal>, and/or why Ubuntu does the
things they do.  I can speculate, though:

  <NOTFOUND=return> declares the next database to be authoritative.
In your example, that means if <dns> returns NXDOMAIN, that will get
propagated back to the caller.  Perhaps <mdns4_minimal> is "better",
while <mdns4> is "worse", so if DNS says no they want to stop there.
Better/worse might mean mean speed to respond, robustness, standards
compliance, or whatever.

  I suspect your name-resolution configuration is still broken, and
you just happened to find a combination of options which masks the
trouble.

-- Ben