Larry, As default Hobbit does use ares resolver library. Maybe it's having some trouble who your nslookup doesn't showup.

You can play with two bbtest-net options, to help give a litle

more info on this issues...

-------<cut from man bbtest-net>---------------- --no-ares Disable the ARES resolver built into bbtest-net. This makes bbtest-net resolve hostnames using your system resolver function. You should only use this as a last resort if bbtest-net cannot resolve the hostnames you use in the normal way (via DNS or /etc/hosts). One reason for using this would be if you need to resolve hostnames via NIS/NIS+ (a.k.a. Yellow Pages). The system resolver function does not provide a mechanism for controlling timeouts of the hostname lookups, so if your DNS or NIS server is down, bbtest-net can take a very long time to run. The --dns-timeout option is effectively disabled when using this option.

   --dnslog=FILENAME
          Log failed hostname lookups to the file FILENAME. FILENAME should be a full pathname.

-------<cut from man bbtest-net>----------------

And you can play a litle with:
cd ~server/bin
"./bbcmd bbtest-net --debug ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov" 

-wm

----------------------- Original Message ----------------------- From: "Larry Barber" <lebarber at gmail.com> To: hobbit <hobbit at hswn.dk> Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 12:52:09 -0500 Subject: [hobbit] trouble with name resolution

I am having a problem getting "Unable to resolve hostname" errors for the conn test for names that are in our DNS system. The bb-hosts entry looks like:

<http://0.0.0.0>0.0.0.0 <http://ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov>ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov # conn

the return from nslookup is:

-bash-2.05b$ nslookup <http://ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov>ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov Server: <http://199.128.64.2>199.128.64.2 Address: 199.128.64.2#53

Non-authoritative answer: <http://ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov>ppd2.wcm.ess.usda.gov canonical name = <http://ppd.wcm.ess.usda.gov>ppd.wcm.ess.usda.gov. Name: <http://ppd.wcm.ess.usda.gov>ppd.wcm.ess.usda.gov Address: <http://199.134.228.6>199.134.228.6

Any ideas how to correct this?

Thanks, Larry Barber