Can Not ping Hosts by name when Underscores are Present.

[Martin McCormick]

	Does the ping utility do some sort of name checking when one
wants to ping a particular host by name?

	A person with an account on a FreeBSD system demonstrated to
me that one could successfully look up a given host using nslookup but
if you pinged that host by name as in

ping host_name.domain, one got an immediate complaint from the ping
utility like:

ping: cannot resolve cl_mail1.mydomain: Unknown server error

	I pinged every single host in a range for which host  or
nslookups work and every single name with the _ failed in this manner.
All other names either show an ICMP reply or nobody answering, in
other words, perfectly normal behavior.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group