DNS working but not resolving

I’ve had a funny situation on a Solaris 10 box where DNS appeared to be working but domain names were not returning. I was able to configm DNS was working using dig

$ dig www.google.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> www.google.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 412
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 5, AUTHORITY: 7, ADDITIONAL: 3

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com.                        IN      A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com.         258091  IN      CNAME   www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com.       289     IN      A       66.249.91.103
www.l.google.com.       289     IN      A       66.249.91.104
www.l.google.com.       289     IN      A       66.249.91.147
www.l.google.com.       289     IN      A       66.249.91.99

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      b.l.google.com.
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      c.l.google.com.
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      d.l.google.com.
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      e.l.google.com.
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      f.l.google.com.
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      g.l.google.com.
l.google.com.           20626   IN      NS      a.l.google.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
a.l.google.com.         83697   IN      A       209.85.139.9
b.l.google.com.         86389   IN      A       64.233.179.9
e.l.google.com.         86008   IN      A       209.85.137.9

;; Query time: 2 msec
;; SERVER: 10.94.70.5#53(10.94.70.5)
;; WHEN: Tue Sep  2 09:44:17 2008
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 276

And pinging the ip address showed the host was up.

$ ping 66.249.91.103
66.249.91.103 is alive

However pinging using a host names failed.

$ ping www.google.com
ping: unknown host www.google.com

The mystery begins to clear up when we use the getent command. From wikipedia: “getent is a unixtext files called databases. This includes the passwd and group databases which store user information – hence getent is a common way to look up user details on Unix. Since getent uses the same name service as the system, getent will show all information, including that gained from network information sources such as LDAP. command that helps a user get entries in a number of important

The databases it searches in are: passwd, group, hosts, services, protocols, or networks.”

$ getent hosts www.google.com
$

The point here is that dig bypasses the host file and goes directly to the dns servers, while ping will obey the Name Service Switch settings as defined in /etc/nsswitch.conf. The solution is simply to edit the file and add the word dns to the line ipnodes:    files

ipnodes:    files dns