Can't ping FQDN in Ubuntu

I created a local DNS zone ending in .local and experienced weird DNS behaviour; dig worked 100%

It seems the avahi-daemon interferes with the normal resolving process. It’s DNS caching borks the normal functionality

The fix:

# shut it down
sudo /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon stop
# stop it starting at the next reboot by removing the startup links
sudo update-rc.d -f avahi-daemon remove
 Removing any system startup links for /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon ...
   /etc/rc1.d/K86avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc2.d/S50avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc3.d/S50avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc4.d/S50avahi-daemon
   /etc/rc5.d/S50avahi-daemon