/etc/hosts not being read?

[mickywicky]

Hi,

rather new Gentoo user, yes I am; but after 4 years of Linux I thought I'd know how to write an /etc/hosts file??
mine looks like this:
-----------
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 kheops kheops.realdomain.org
192.168.101 ipaq ipaq.localdomain
192.168.201 kephren kephren.localdomain
--------------

now when I am connected via ppp to host ipaq, doign a ssh micky@ipaq gives me:
ssh: ipaq: Name or service not known

and ping ipaq gives me:
ipaq: unknown host

However doing any of the above using the IP address works fine.
Like the hosts file is never read... my DNS do not know about these two hosts, and I assume Gentoo is only querying them instead of checking the hosts file first.
In Solaris there is this nsswitch.conf file which you can use to set this, howver I do not recall anything like that on Linux.
Any ideas?
Thanks for any pointers

Micky

[mickywicky]

forget it, it was a typo... both IP addresses were missing a 1 in the middle... silly me