dig lookup different from system lookup

Question

I am running dd-wrt and I configured it's dns server to resolve a few hosts inside my network.

When I use dig to lookup these hosts, they are resolved OK, but when I try to ping those hosts I always receive an unknown host error message.

For example:

obe:~ simao$ dig dd-wrt
; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> dd-wrt
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 44026
;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;dd-wrt.                IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
dd-wrt.         0   IN  A   192.168.1.1

But then:

obe:~ simao$ ping dd-wrt
ping: cannot resolve dd-wrt: Unknown host

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Answer 1

This seems to me like a Mac OS X specific problem, after doing some googling. I found quite a few threads on forums discussing this issue. An example:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2213373

Apparently it could be because your /etc/resolv.conf has two DNS-servers configured, and dig goes through both of them to find the host 'dd-wrt', while ping gives up after using only one of the DNS-servers. Try reversing the order of your servers in resolv.conf