Comment 12 for bug 999725

On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 19:33:37 -0000, Paul Crawford wrote:
> domain, I think). I don't really understand NIS, and the
> guy usually responsible for this sort of thing is away,
> but as far as I know it only provides local-area
> user/machine authentication and so I would be surprised
> if it 'knows' about anything outside of our sub-domain
> (like google, or even the other university machines as
> they are not part of our NIS set-up).

For what it's worth, I see that at least some NIS servers
do support behind-the-scenes DNS lookups within the "hosts"
map; see for example the "-n" option to FreeBSD's ypserv
command:
  http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=8&topic=ypserv#10

So presumably some such server is in use at your site. (As
far as I can tell, the NIS servers for Linux don't support
that function, so I assume your NIS server there is not
running Ubuntu...)

However, the advice I see on the web generally agrees that
this function is obsolete (since the nsswitch.conf file now
lets clients configure the NIS v.s. DNS issue directly), so
I wonder if your "NIS guy" actually intended for DNS
resolution to be left unconfigured on your Precise
system...?

      Nathan