I am running opensolaris as a virtual machine using virtualbox on a windows vista host. based on this setup, even if the networking works completely 100% ok i would be unable to ping anything other than the host machine due to the way that virtualbox handles networking in NAT mode (i only mention this as a reason why i do host lookups and not ping anything below)
after installing opensolaris i noticed that i was unable to browse to google.com in firefox or resolve google.com through a host lookup (ie the following command would just time out) host google.com I disabled nwam and activated manual networking by: svcadm disable svc:/network/physical:nwam svcadm enable svc:/network/physical:default i configured my ISPs primary/secondary DNS servers by making the appropriate entries in /etc/resolv.conf at this point i was still unable to browse to google.com in firefox but i could resolve the IP for google.com through a host lookup. i then editted /etc/nsswitch.conf and modified the following line: hosts: files to this: hosts: files dns after this i could browse to google.com in firefox and resolve it via a host lookup what i dont understand is: why should i have to modify the /etc/nsswittch.conf file? This message posted from opensolaris.org