telnet and ftp

[dmartin at ne.arris-i.com (Derek Martin)]

On Mon, 20 Dec 1999, Jack Coats at coats.org wrote:

> I see the same thing at times whether I use IP address or name (also,
> all hosts involved are in the hosts file on each end).

Even if all hosts are in the hosts files, you may still get DNS-related
timeouts if your nsswitch.conf files are not configured properly. Or,
should I say "optimally" that is... it's hard to say that one way or
another is correct when it comes  to this.

Anyway, you should see a line in /etc/nsswitch.conf that looks something
like:

hosts:  nis dns files


When your system does a gethostbyaddr() it will first try nis, then DNS,
and finally the hosts file to get the IP address.  So if you don't have
DNS set up for your machines, and you want to avoid this problem, change
the line to:

hosts: files

Note that this will not do ANY DNS so if you need to get connected to the
internet from these machines, you should use:

hosts: files dns   # add nis on the end if you use it...


-- 
Derek D. Martin
Senior UNIX Systems/Network Administrator
Arris Interactive
derek.martin at ne.arris-i.com

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