Yes, well I've been working on that since my last post and I'm not sure why it is not working..
I've added "server-chat" to my /etc/hosts file like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain
::1 server-chat
192.168.1.150 server-chat
I've also verified that /etc/host.conf contains the following lines:
multi on
order hosts,bind
I've also verified that /etc/nsswitch.conf contains the line:
hosts: files dns
nslookup still fails when it contacts my local DNS server. I could add an entry to my DNS server, but why is CentOS not using its local files?
It seems absolutely incredible to me that a default install of CentOS 7 in the year 2014 is not capable of recognizing and resolving its own hostname. I think Win3.11 for Workgroups could do that out of the box.