> This fact may be related as the .local domain is used (reserved?) for
> Avahi and mDNS.
>
> On Fedora, my /etc/nsswitch.conf file has the following:
>
> hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
>
> I expect Ubuntu's is very similar, so if the mdns lookup fails the
> entire host lookup will also fail. You could probably move
> mdns4_minimal to the end of the line, so your DNS takes precedence:
>
> hosts: files dns mdns4_minimal
>
> This might affect Avahi though, but if you don't care about it just
> remove or disable the Avahi services entirely.
>
> Or the best solution might be to change your internal domain sooner
> rather than later! There are a few domains and TLDs reserved for
> internal use:
>
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606#page-2
Thanks very much Dominic, this must be it.
I set-up a .bogus domain which worked as expected, I then scooped out
all the .bogus bits and replaced with .local and it still didn't work.
As you say, .local must be reserved. I thought it must be something
specific to the client.
I have now decided to use one of my .net domains for internal. I had
been advised against making my own up since a ICANN are planning to
create many new gTLDs in the future:
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtld-program.htm
The next challenge for me is configuring the domain to point to my own
nameservers, which looks a bit fiddly with GoDaddy.
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