Comment 2 for bug 140663

I think maybe you should be a little clearer on the issue here, useing <HOST> is a little broad.

the problem is not only on Ubuntu, but on Suse 10.3 (works find on Suse 10.2) Fedora 8, Debian Etch and CentOS 5 (of what I've tested)

we were using "ourdomain.com" internally for our machines until recently, we changed this to "ourdomain.local" to be a little clearer about where we were looking

using using the .com domain worked without any issues on nslookup and on a ping, using the .local domain works with nslookup but doesn't work with a ping.

now, replacing /lib/libnss_dns.so.2 on a suse 10.3 box with the file from suse 10.2 fixes this issue.

it also gets more interesting than that, because I have this issue on my Ubuntu 8.04 x64 system, infact on 3 of them, however, on my x86 32bit Ubuntu 8.04 (2 of them) I do _NOT_ have this issue.

part of the problem is the mdns info in /etc/nsswitch.conf - because you don't have mdns setup on your network, another part of the problem, is that you have "[NOTFOUND=return]" after mdns_minimal4 and dns, which means if the domain is multicast DNS domain (which by default a .local is) and it's not found in mdns_minimal (which it won't be because you don't have mDNS setup) then it will return "Host not found" - removing the "[NOTFOUND=return]" also fixes this problem - though lookup on a .local address is a little slower.

if you don't have mdns setup, then there is no real reason to have the mdns info in nsswitch.conf but given how I fixed this on Suse, it looks like it's possibly an issue with the 64bit version of libnss_dns.so.2

Confirming because I also have this issue on a multitude of systems.