apt-get resolution bug??

[John Cichy <john@greengator.com>]

Hello,

I understand by the signup page for this list that is it a read-only list, 
but I was told by the dpkg list to come here. 

I have a NAT'd DMZ w/5 static addresses. I have a apache webserver with 4 
virtual hosts one of which contains a debian mirror. I recently installed a 
new debian box to act as a mail server, the installation and configuration 
was done while the box was on my private network. When I got to the point of 
setting up the apt sources, I set up my server (enterprisepenguin.com) in the 
sources.list file. The install went great, and after I was done testing, I 
moved the server into the DMZ. I added an entry in the hosts file for 
enterprisepenguin.com pointing to the 'real' (DMZ private) address. When I 
tried to do apt-get update the machine hung in trying to connect to 
enterprisepenguin.com and noticed that it was trying to connect to the public 
address for the server rather then the private address listed in my hosts 
file. A suggestion from the debian-users list was to add a short name, 
'mirror' to the hosts file and change my sources.list file to reflect this. I 
changed one of the two entries to 'mirror' and received a 404 error from the 
web server (I expected this because the server is using name based virtual 
hosting and the server did not no what to serve up for the name 'mirror'.  

This gives me the impression that apt-get is doing the opposite of what I 
told it to do in both the host.conf and nsswitch.conf files, which was look 
at hosts first then look to dns.

I have worked around this problem by putting a symlink on the top level 
server to the mirrored directories and instead of putting the hostname in the 
sources.list, I put the actual private IP address in. Although this works, 
shouldn't apt-get respect the host.conf entries?

I am not complaining!!! I am coming from RedHat systems with RPM, and from my 
point of view APT is far superior!!!

Thanks for your great work...
John