ping

[CokeOnIce]

RH 6.1

ping

When I try to ping an IP address it works.

When I try to ping a URL (www.yahoo.com) it does not.

What should I look for?

[Dark Ninja]

I'm thinking your program is screwed up. Unless of course you don't have your computer setup to recognize domain names. (Can you connect to www.yahoo.com (http://www.yahoo.com) in your web browser, or do you have to type the IP address.)

Anyway, yeah, I can ping www.yahoo.com, (http://www.yahoo.com,) no problem.


Dark Ninja

[cabu1966]

do you have your nameserver setup in /etc/resolv.conf?

[CokeOnIce]

I do have nameservers set up. I will give more info on my setup.

I have used netconf and linuxconf to try to set these things. I have even manually changed 'hosts' and 'resolv.conf'.

Settings in etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 localhost
10.0.0.4 dialin

Settings in etc/resolv.conf:
search inebraska.com
nameserver 199.184.119.1
nameserver 199.2.252.10

Settings in netconf:
NAMES:
Hostname: localhost
Domain: inebraska.com
Nameservers: 199.184.119.1
199.2.252.10
HOSTS:
127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
10.0.0.4 dialin

INTERFACES:
lo 127.0.0.1 none yes active
eth0 10.0.0.4 none yes active

ROUTING:
Default gateway: 10.0.0.1 (this is the IP address of my DSL router)
Default gateway device: (blank)

I assigned my eth0 the IP address of 10.0.0.4 since my DSL router uses 10.0.0.1
I have assigned all of my other PC's (a total of three) with statis IP's using that same outline (ie, 10.0.0.xx) and they work fine.

When I run ifconfig, it reports what I expect from what I have set in netconf:
eht0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:20:AF:32:7D:6D
inet addr:10.0.0.4 Bcast:10.255.255.255 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
etc...

lo Link encap: Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
etc...

This is what the route command shows:
Kernal IP routing table:
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use IFace
10.0.0.4 * 255.255.255.0 UH 0 0 0 eth0
10.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0
127.0.0.0 * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
default * 10.0.0.1 UG 0 0 0 eth0

That last line may have been added by me using 'route add'.

So, the deal still is that I can ping an IP address out on the Internet, my ISP, Yahoo!, but I cannot ping www.yahoo.com. (http://www.yahoo.com.)

Any further help would be deeply appreciated.

[Craig McPherson]

The first thing to do is ping your two nameservers to actually get a connection to them. Then try doing some forward-lookups from them, using commands like "host <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com"" TARGET=_blank>www.yahoo.com"</A> or "nslookup <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com"" TARGET=_blank>www.yahoo.com"</A> (there's a slim chance you won't have host on your system, but nslookup will almost certainly be there). That'll show you where the process is breaking down -- if it can't connect to your nameservers at all, that's your problem. If the nameservers return some error, that's the problem. If the nameservers actually DO look up the host correctly, then it's a problem with your local system resolver. Look in your /etc/nsswitch.conf. That file is checked before resolv.conf, and tells the system what methods to use to try to look up domain names. You need to make sure DNS is listed there. A "hosts: files dns" line is normal: that tells the system resolver to check /etc/hosts first, then use DNS by reading the DNS servers from resolv.conf. It's possible that for some weird reason you just have "hosts: files" listed or some other weirdness.

[CokeOnIce]

I can ping the nameservers with their IP address. They return just fine. I just cannot ping them with their names (or any other name).

I checked that file you mentioned. It had some wierd thing like:
hosts: files nis nisfiles dns

I changed it to just:
hosts: files dns

There are some other entries in there to regarding password and other stuff using NIS(?).

What is NIS? Should it be doing that?

[Craig McPherson]

Your nsswitch.conf was fine how it was, but you didn't hurt anything by changing it. NIS is a directory service similar to LDAP but much older, but it has nothing to do with your current problem at all so I won't say anymore about it.

Now that you know your system is configured to use DNS, and you know that you have at the very least an IP connection to your nameservers, the next step to isolate the problem is to figure out where the communication process with the nameservers is going wrong.

I'd like to see the exact output of the following command:

host -v yahoo.com

Try to look up some other sites with it, too. If you don't have "host" on your system, use "nslookup". Remember host's "-v" option for verbose output.

Good luck!

[CokeOnIce]

Well, I am a tad bit frustrated.

Last night I followed some instructions that a guy had posted to get hooked up to COX@Home. I used what applied to me. Guess what?! It worked! I was able to ping www.yahoo.com. (http://www.yahoo.com.) I was able to start Netscape and surf.

Now, tonight, nothing again!

Here is the result of:

host -v yahoo.com
Forcing '-t a' for signature trace
Trying null domain
Trying domain "inetnebr.com"
Host not found, try again.

That is it. I have changed the domain back to inebraska.com (inetnebr.com was the original name and now they have something that makes it look like inebraska.com).

As a further note, sendmail takes an interminable amount of time to load upon boot.

Thanks for all your help so far Craig.