With all due respect +thejranjan, it's not really Ubuntu's fault. Microsoft recommended for years that companies use '.local' as their internal domain suffix so as not to conflict with the existing DNS namespace like .com, .net, .org, etc...
Unfortunately Microsoft just decided to recommend .local without thinking it through or registering .local with any standards body. Later on a standards body decided to use .local for Multicast DNS. So you run into this problem when you connect your Ubuntu box (and I believe Debian as well) to a Microsoft Windows network that *violates* established standards. The fix is easy enough--edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and remove multicast DNS. That gives you access to your internal network which is configured improperly. Unfortunately you might have trouble communicating with multicast DNS services. A work-around is to remove the '[NOTFOUND=return]' part of the mdns config. That basically tells the system to try looking up from multicast DNS and immediately fail if multicast DNS doesn't find anything. If you remove it, you will still have delays looking up hosts on your internal network, but you *will* get the best of both worlds-- multicast DNS resolution *and* resolution of your incorrectly-named internal network. So there's nothing really for Ubuntu to fix. It's up to you to fix your internal network or make a change to your Ubuntu install so it can communicate with your improperly configured internal network. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to avahi in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/94940 Title: mdns listed in nsswitch.conf causes excessive time for dns lookups Status in avahi package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in nss-mdns package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in nss-mdns package in Debian: Fix Released Bug description: Binary package hint: avahi-daemon I encountered this problem on a machine that is integrated into our work network. I performed a dist-upgrade to Feisty on my desktop and all went well. I've noticed recently that any dns based work seemed to take a significantly longer time then normal. My system is getting dns information on our company internal systems from two dns servers. Previously, if I tried to establish an ssh connection with another system I could generally expect the connection in under 3 secs. After the dist-upgrade the time went from under 3 seconds to approximately 25 seconds. After searching around the system I found an entry in /etc/nsswitch.conf that cause me a little concern. The line in question is: hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 I looked around a bit and it seems that the references to mdns are really talking about communication with the Avahi mDNS/DNS-SD daemon. Since this looks to be a part of a zeroconf configuration I wasn't expecting too much in my current environment, as we really only have three Mac's. What concerned me is the idea that if we hit files with no answer there is a delay while we hit the other options until we hit dns, which is where the information I seek existed. For an experiment I tried two separate tests. The first changed the line to looks like: hosts: files dns mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] mdns The change should have improved the time, but I was still looking at approximately 23 seconds to return a command prompt on the destination machine. Finally, I change the entry to simply: hosts: files dns After this change I was again receiving the destination command prompt in under 3 seconds. I don't know if simply changing the file will correct the problem long-term or not. Seems to help me, but might be the way to go for most Ubuntu users. ProblemType: Bug Architecture: i386 Date: Thu Mar 22 18:10:54 2007 DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.04 Uname: Linux samdesk 2.6.20-12-generic #2 SMP Wed Mar 21 20:55:46 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/avahi/+bug/94940/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : touch-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
