/etc/hosts vs DNS & sendmail

Hi All,

I have a question about how /etc/hosts & DNS work on a solaris 9 box.

When I have entries in /etc/hosts that are not in DNS and I run say nslookup the utility will not find the ip. Put if I ping the entry in /etc/hosts it will find it.Basically I have a box with default sendmail and in /etc/hosts I have a entry with mailhost added to it at the end.nslookup does not find the box ping does and sendmail can't send mail to it and I can not verify that it ever sendmail correctly.

1) what is up with nslookup no seeing /etc/hosts?

2) can sendmail send to hosts per FQDN listed in /etc/hosts & use a DNS server at the same time?

thanks

-im

[699 byte] By [purple.thingsa] at [2007-11-26 17:12:14]