Okay, after lots of research I fixed my own problem. The problem was due to
the fact that I'm using the .local suffix in my Windows domain. Aparently
SUSE Linux doesn't like this or rather libresolv doesn't like this. Programs
like ping use libresolv but other programs like nslookup don't. Here's what I
did at my linux machine:

cd /lib
cp libresolv.so.2 libresolv.so.2-orig
rm libresolv.so.2
cp libresolv.so.2-orig libresolv.so.2
perl -pi -e 's/local/lozal/g' libresolv.so.2
shutdown -r 0

I have no idea what that does or why it works but it did. I can now ping
all the machines in my local network by hostname.

"BlenderStyle" wrote:

> 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?