In the past, I’ve had trouble getting my Ubuntu machine to resolve the .local hostnames at work. I didn’t know why Ubuntu had this problem while other machines did not.<\/p>\n
When I did a DNS lookup, it failed, and ping of host.something.local failed. Yet ping of the hostname without the .something.local extension worked. Odd. I googled various terms, but nothing useful came up. I tried watching the DNS lookup with tcpdump, but it didn’t capture anything.<\/p>\n
Eventually, I thought of using ‘strace ping host.something.local’ to see what was happening, and it turns out that DNS was never being queried — it was talking to something called avahi.<\/p>\n
I googled “avahi”, and was reminded that hostname resolution is configured in \/etc\/nsswitch.conf. In the case of Ubuntu, it’s configured to send *.local requests to Avahi (mdns4_minimal), and no further — i.e. if Avahi doesn’t resolve it, it doesn’t try DNS.<\/p>\n
In my case, I want corporate DNS to resolve .local addresses. So I changed my \/etc\/nsswitch.conf from this:<\/p>\n
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns mdns4<\/p>\n
to this:<\/p>\n
hosts: files wins dns mdns4_minimal mdns4<\/p>\n
And now my Ubuntu development machine can communicate with our internal .local machines without having to resort to using IP addresses, short names, or having to place the mapping in \/etc\/hosts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the past, I’ve had trouble getting my Ubuntu machine to resolve the .local hostnames at work. I didn’t know why Ubuntu had this problem while other machines did not. When I did a DNS lookup, it failed, and ping of host.something.local failed. Yet ping of the hostname without the .something.local extension worked. Odd. I … <\/p>\n