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Weird: Name resoultion for root only?!



Please help!

I have already posted about this weird thing to comp.os.linux.network,
but nobody seems to be able to help me, maybe one of you Debian
specialists will have a clue...

Here is my problem: My newly installed Debian 2.0 box (I'm new to
Debian, but not to Linux in general) can see IP addresses and correctly
resolved names if I'm logged in as root, and everything works just fine;
however, if I'm logged in as a _regular user_, I can only get IP
addresses, no names are recognized at all, meaning that for instance
ping would not even see my ISP's host name. -- Now shouldn't the name
service work for _all_ users on a given machine (or for none of them)?
Any permission issues to be taken into account?

I have a suspicion that /etc/nsswitch.conf could be involved, but I
couldn't figure out what the whole thing is actually about, and the
documentation that I have found on the net isn't exactly human readable
:-) It seems related to glibc6, though.

To describe my setup, I do no networking whatsoever apart from
connecting to my ISP via modem/ppp, no special network daemons (inetd,
portmap) are running. On bootup I just run the /etc/init.d/network
script, which merely does the following:
ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
route add -net 127.0.0.0

Again, the netbase script which came as the default for runlevel 2 has
been unlinked (and even when I booted with this script enabled, it
didn't matter). 

Then I have these config files:

/etc/host.conf:
order hosts,bind
multi on

/etc/resolv.conf:
search berlin.snafu.de ###my provider
nameserver 194.64.64.1 ###my provider's nameserver

As you can see, this is a very simple setup, BTW the same thing has been
running smoothly for a long time on the same machine with Suse
installed. So there must be something wrong Debian-wise, but I don't see
where to look further. Now I have even compiled a new kernel to keep out
firewall stuff etc., but it didn't help either.

Oh please make me stay with Debian, I really began to like it, until I
discovered this ugly thing :-|

Any help is greatly appreciated.

-- O. Niepolt


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