I installed dnsmasq on a machine of mine (It's a Kubuntu 12.04 LTS), backed only by /etc/hosts (no connection to the Internet until later). Now, when I'm on the same machine as the dnsmasq - or any other machine on the server, I can dig mymachine and get 192.168.0.1, but if I try to nslookup mymachine, I get:

>> connection timed out; no servers could be reached

Tried also nslookup mymachine.mynicedomain.org - didn't work either. pinging fails.

How can I the DNS lookups to work? Is the problem with the nsswitch entries? The dnsmasq configuration?

Additional Information

In the server's /etc/hosts:

192.168.0.1   mymachine

In the server's nsswitch.conf:

hosts: files mdns4_mininal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

(admittedly, this is a bit weird)

In resolv.conf (which is generated by dnsmasq):

nameserver 127.0.0.1
search mynicedomain.org

In the server's /etc/hosts.allow:

domain: ALL    

In the other machines' /etc/resolv.conf (this is set by the DHCP client):

nameserver 192.168.0.1
search mynicedomain.org

Finally, here's the ipconfig output from one of the client machines on the network (running Windows 7):

Connection-specific DNS Suffix  . : mynicedomain.org
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Intel(R) 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 12-34-56-78-9A-BC
DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.50(Preferred)
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Sunday, October 20th 2013 16:20:25
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Sunday, October 20th 2013 18:20:24
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled

Notes:

• May be related to this question.