[Techtalk] bind question

[Maria McKinley]

Hello there,

I have bind set up with two "views". One is for the outside world, and 
one is for our internal use. The ip addresses are different depending on 
which side of the firewall you are. Internally, we can talk to local 
machines without using the domain name, ie. 'ping sarah' contacts the 
machine, sarah.shadlen.org. While trying to setup some software, I 
noticed that when I ping this way, the answer is rather inconsistent:

herbie:~# ping sarah
PING sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.208.108.18: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.926 ms
64 bytes from 10.208.108.18: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.201 ms

mingus:~# ping sarah
PING sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sarah.local (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.155 ms
64 bytes from sarah.local (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.154 ms
64 bytes from sarah.local (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.188 ms

herbie:~# ping sarah
PING sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 
time=0.220 ms
64 bytes from sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 
time=0.196 ms
64 bytes from sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 
time=0.175 ms
64 bytes from sarah.shadlen.org (10.208.108.18): icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 
time=0.200 ms

Sometimes it does not give a hostname, sometimes it gives hostname.local 
and sometimes it gives the fully qualified domain name (fqdn). Turns out 
that this is important for some software I am running, which wants to 
get the fqdn back. I figured out that I can get the fqdn back if I put 
and entry for the machine I am pinging to in /etc/hosts of the machine I 
am pinging from, but it seems like I should be able to do this in bind 
somehow. I now notice that pinging from outside the firewall also gives 
just the ip for my machines, but I can ping university machines and get 
back the fqd. So, I'm sure it must be my bind config, but not sure what. 
Any bind experts?

thanks,
maria