Thank you for quick responses

2 people said try ping -n

this removed the delay. Thank you.

This means that it is trying to look up the names and failing.

Machine A - the netbsd machine is running as a name server, it has no outside connection the the internet at the moment.

From my limited experience of DNS, this would mean that it can't convert an ip address to a name BUT it can convert a name to an ip address.

Thank you for your help, I now to figure out the problem with my dns config.