How to Setup Reverse DNS on LAN?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 05:50:25AM -0800,
 Drew Tomlinson <drew at mykitchentable.net> wrote 
 a message of 33 lines which said:

> When connecting via ssh to my FBSD boxes, it takes over a minute
> before the connection is established.  Searching the archives
> suggests that this is due to a failed reverse DNS lookup that must
> time out before connecting.

Probably.

> But 192.168.1.3 does not:
> 
> blacksheep> host 192.168.1.3
> Host not found, try again.

On FreeBSD 5.1, it appears, speaking both from the man page and from
an actual test, that host does not use /etc/hosts at all. It would be
nice to have a command which uses getaddrinfo() but host does not.

ping would be a better test:

~ % ping localhost
PING fetiche (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.253 ms

The name 'fetiche' was found in /etc/hosts.