DNS issues with Cisco VPN (vpnc) on 15.04
Solution 1:
The problem was that all of our on-network servers are named *.local and this is inherently incompatible with Avahi. More reading.
The solution I used was to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and change the following line:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
To:
hosts: files dns mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]