Comment 16 for bug 356022

I figured out what the problem was!

We are customer's of Comcast, a large American ISP, in State College, Pennsylvania, USA.

They have DNS search redirection or whatever. EVERY hostname name is resolved by them. If it isn't one on the public internet, they redirect you to their web server with a search result for whatever the hostname is.

Eg. if I were to enter "adgagsfaa" or "minitrue" as the address bar in firefox, comcast's search results for those terms would come up because it resolved those random/local addresses to their web server. Similarly if I enter those terms as an address in nautilus, comcast DNS resolves them to their web server as well. In other words, Comcast's DNS results are superseding all of the SMB/WINS/NMB/whatever results for the local network.

I just tried "ping telescreen" from minitrue, and it resolved it to 208.68.139.38 .

I believe this may be a problem with OpenDNS as well.

I fixed the problem by using Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4). Immediately everything started working.

Windows does not have this problem because they have SMB/WINS/NMB/whatever to resolve hostnames before they try DNS results.

One possible workaround, other than using a real DNS service, is to implement windows' behavior with /etc/nsswitch.conf.

Whether or not Ubuntu's software should be patched to avoid this problem, I don't know. I doubt using either of these workarounds could be made user friendly.