Nathan Moore said...

|
|[root@toulouse ~]# cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
|#
|# /etc/nsswitch.conf
|#
|# An example Name Service Switch config file. This file should be
|# sorted with the most-used services at the beginning.
|...
|#hosts:     db files nisplus nis dns
|# hosts:      files nis dns  this was the original version
|hosts:  dns files nis
|
|When I changed the order of the hosts entry, the name lookup worked.

Is honker by any chance an NIS server?
If so, it may have an /etc/hosts file
that has honker set to 127.0.0.1 .

|I
|suppose the other route would be to have a long /etc/hosts file on each
|machine that defines the names of all nodes.

You could, but maintenance is a pain.
This is what DNS is for, and it normally
works just fine.

|I'm still confused about the contents of /etc/hosts though.  Any ideas?

Only the suspicion I mentioned before,
that's it's the IPv6 version of localhost.

-Miles