I have a Windows 2000 Active Directory. I just added a Linux client. The
linux client is receiving DHCP from my domain controller. I've added an entry
for my linux client in Windows 2000 DNS so now all my Windows machines can
ping the linux machine by its hostname.

I set /etc/resolv.conf on the linux machine to use the correct domain and
nameserver. I also set /etc/host.conf: order bind, hosts and
/etc/nsswitch.conf: hosts: dns files

This is the wierd part. From the linux machine I can ping stuff on the
internet (like Google) however, I can't ping anything inside my local network
by hostname. I even tried pinging using the fully qualified domain name but
still no luck.

Now it gets really wierd. If I use nslookup on the linux machine I can query
query local hostnames and it works fine. So why does that work but ping
doesn't?