Symptom: I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon on my IBM X31 laptop. I use DHCP locally and two local Microsoft DNS servers for my private domain, socci.local I try to ping my local hosts: server1.socci.local, server2, etc… in all cases I receive “unknown host”. I can ping other domains. nslookup resolves the ip addresses correctly in a split second. What gives?

Resolution: After some creative Googling,  I find out this is a short-coming (I won’t call it a bug) in a network service called Avahi, which maintains it’s own domain for registering network services: .local - therefore, attempts to resolve host.local never make it to the intended DNS server because the Avahi service is maintaining this local DNS-like zone.

I turned off the Avahi service in Gutsy via System/Administration/Services - disabling “Multicast DNS service Discovery”.

I love simple fixes. http://avahi.org/wiki/AvahiAndUnicastDotLocal