[Techtalk] ssh and name resolution

[Maria McKinley]

Wim De Smet wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org> wrote:
>> Gayathri Swaminathan wrote:
>>>> Hey Maria:
>>>>
>>>> Seems to work for me ( see output below )
>>>>
>>>> Is your reverse DNS well?
>>>>
>>>> <snip>
>> It is definitely a problem with this particular machine. Other machines
>> work just fine sshing to this and other hosts. This machine cannot ssh
>> to any other machine, although they all resolve just fine using dig,
>> host, ping, etc. I think it has to be an ssh problem, but the ssh
>> configs are the same as on my other machines. I am going to check to see
>> if ssh is a different version from my other machines. But now the
>> machine seems to be down entirely, so that will have to wait until I go
>> into work tomorrow.
> 
> While you're at it, compare what's in /etc/resolv.conf and
> /etc/nsswitch.conf, might be a weird resolver config problem.
> 
> greets,
> Wim
> _______________________________

The plot thickens. So, when I came into work today, I discovered that 
the reason that I could no longer contact this machine is that it had 
decided that it did not want to keep the status ip that I had set in 
/etc/network/interfaces, but instead decided to go get a dhcp ip.

Here is /etc/network/interfaces:
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
         address 10.208.108.17
         netmask 255.255.255.0
         gateway 10.208.108.10
         network 10.208.108.0
         broadcast 10.208.108.255

The syslog is filled with this stuff:
Sep  9 06:47:15 buttercup dhclient: DHCPREQUEST on eth0 to 10.208.108.10 
port 67
Sep  9 06:47:15 buttercup dhclient: DHCPACK from 10.208.108.10
Sep  9 06:47:15 buttercup dhclient: bound to 10.208.108.83 -- renewal in 
1693 seconds.

What would cause this to happen? I have a vague sense that this happened 
to me once before, and that rebooting fixed it. I am going to try that, 
but wondering if anyone has run into this before or knows of some 
program that tries to take over networking from networking?

cheers,
maria