PING failing, but DIG works fine

[Kevin Darcy]

Idris Saliu wrote:

>Hi  all,
>  I'm a newbie trying to get a dns server working for my local lan. I 
>seem to have gotten everything working correctly, from my dns server. 
>when I use dig, i get the expected information and i can also ping the 
>different hosts and get the expected results. My problem is this, from 
>any other machine in my network, dig works fine, giving me the expected 
>information for names of the servers on my lan, what fails is pinging 
>the same hostname returns an unknown hostname error.  The server also 
>runs a dhcp server and that works as expected.
>
Have you configured your system to use DNS for name resolution? 
Different OS platforms have different ways of configuring this (e.g. in 
Solaris, /etc/nsswitch.conf controls this). dig is hardwired to use DNS, 
so it is independent of the system-wide name-resolution configuration 
settings.

                                                                         
                                    - Kevin