Comment 57 for bug 94940

I stumbled upon this issue as well. I am using ubuntu in a local network with a local dns server, which serves foo.local hostnames. When I did a "host bar.foo.local" I got the correct response "Host bar.foo.local has IP xx.xx.xx.xx"; however f.e. "ping bar.foo.local" gave an "unknown host" response.

Turned out that resolving was done using multicast dns instead of normal dns - I discovered that by using a network sniffer.

By googling for "mdns ubuntu" I found this bugreport.

I removed the "mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]" part from /etc/nsswitch.conf and that indeed resolved the issue. IMHO that should be the default for ubuntu.