woody - problems with dns

[Steffen Evers <mldeb@forevers.de>]

Hello,

I have some problems with the DNS service on my woody system and I think
I have experienced the same problems on my sid installation:

Maybe I have misunderstood something, but I think this behavior is not
correct:

When I look for the hostname of my local machine with 

> host mymachine
> mymachine does not exist, try again

> host localhost
> localhost               A       127.0.0.1

I have tried several alternatives in /etc/hosts, but it did not work:
> 127.0.0.1   localhost mymachine
or
> 127.0.0.1   localhost
> 127.0.0.1   mymachine

It feels like that the /etc/hosts file is not used at all.

However, the file /etc/nsswitch.conf does contain the line:
> hosts:          files dns

Therefore I think everything is set up correctly, but still it doesn't
work. I have never tried 'host mymachine' before. So, I do not really know
if this behavior is new. However, my router is set to 'dial on demand' and
I used to be offline for long periods, but now the router dials in because
of the DNS query looking for mymachine after a few minutes. Therefore I
guess this behavior has been introduced to my system by one of my regular
package updates recently (1 week?).

Hints, solutions, location for documentation, comments?

Should I send a bug report? To which package?

Bye, Steffen