Ubuntu and OpenVPN FQDN Problems.

I have been having some weird problems with OpenVPN on my clean Ubuntu 10.10 (desktop) install whenever I connect to a remote LAN using OpenVPN. The remote LAN hosts a number of servers, all located under the domain company.local (example). Even if it connects and I can ping the remote machine that is called testserver, I can NOT ping the same server through its fully qualified domain name (FQDN) testserver.company.local. Ping would fail with the following error:

ping: unknown host testserver.company.local

Trying to lookup the FQDN with nslookup works just fine! Strange!

Now it appears that the reason is something called a MDNS (Multicast DNS) which kicks in and handles (by default) all .local domains. Looking at the file /etc/nsswitch.conf I found a line that looks like this:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

Apparently the '.local' extension is not sent to the DNS server for resolution if the MDNS system cant resolve it. So I went ahead and changed the line to:

hosts: files mdns4_minimal dns mdns4

I went back to the shell and ran ping testserver.company.local again, and lo-and-behold it works!

Software used:

• NetworkManager
• NetworkManager-OpenVPN
• OpenVPN
• Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop