Well, First off I assume when you say you can't ping to work your trying only the hostname and not the IP, otherwise it is another problem.
With regard to DNS lookups only and resolv.conf, each server in turn is checked until one responds, no further checking is done. If you maintain a private internal DNS server and consult the external first, no internal names would be found so long as the external server was up, unless you use an NIS trick.
You mention that you use NIS. Assuming you have a NIS host map, you are not referencing it in you nsswitch.conf file, hence NIS is never consulted. Since NIS has the capabilty to use DNS in its lookups befor it returns a result, you could consult NIS using DNS for internal names and later DNS using the external server and get a combined view.
Another problem I see is thatyour resolve.conf specifies no actions to take pending on the status of a particular service lookup. There are defaults that come with the libraries some tools are compiled with but not all. That means you can get lookup failures with one tool and not others. It is documented in the nsswitch.conf man page but you might try a line like:
host: hosts [ NOTFOUND=continue ] dns [ NOTFOUND = continue ] nis
A couple of other notes. The resolver libraries that most apps use are not used by nslookup, so this is not the best testing utility. HP also provides nsquery which does use the resolver libraries. Also, one thing important to HP is that forward and reverse lookups match, so much so that the resolver will do a forward and reverse lookup even if you only ask for a forward lookup. Having these not match will cause a lot of problems and it is one of the first things I look at when a problem comes up.
