I'm administrating a networked environment where the users authenticate over NIS.All machines can be used to SSH into the server but one.On the machine in question, I get the message ssh: connect to host servername port 22: Connection refusedI compared strace outputs from the machine in question and a machine that can SSH into the server correctly.It turns out the machine that can't SSH into the server doesn't consult /etc/hosts while the machine that can SSH correctly does. Both machines have /etc/hosts set up with the server's name and IP. In the end, the machine that doesn't consult /etc/hosts ends up trying to connect to  127.0.0.1 (localhost) and fails with the above message. What can be causing this?Additional information:   The server I'm trying to SSH into also acts as the name server and both machines consult it while trying to SSH into it. The machine that can't SSH into the server can SSH correctly into other machines when I dossh machinenameThe strace logs show that the machine consults the nameserver (this time successfully) and manages to resolve the remote machine name correctly and connect to it.EDIT: I will gladly provide any additional information that you think might help solve this issue.
Why does SSH not consult /etc/hosts?
ssh;hosts
It sounds to me like the problem host does not have a correctly configured nsswitch.conf.The hosts line of /etc/nsswitch.conf should look something like this:hosts:  files nisplus nis dnsHowever, the exact contents will vary due to your environment. You should compare against working hosts and make changes accordingly.