DNS woes

This is nothing to do with kubuntu. I was having the problem with Adept package manager waiting for lists again. Patience ran out, so I thought I'd enter the IP addresses for security.ubuntu.com and my.archive.ubuntu.com directly into /etc/hosts. Thinking slackware didn't have the problem, I pinged those servers from a PC running slackware. I got 1.0.0.0 back as an address. Hmmm. Using telnet to connect direct to the router, a ping from there gives me the correct address. So what's going on? Editing the IP addresses of the servers direct into /etc/hosts means DNS won't be used at all. It's not a fix, just another workaround.

Can we rule out IPv6 now? It's not compiled into the Slackware kernel I'm using, and not loaded as a module. It seems intermittent too. I haven't changed anything on my Slackware PC, and now a ping to those servers works. I give up. The workarounds will work. One day, if I'm really, really bored, I might look at this problem again.