*BSD News Article 52929


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From: j@interface-business.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc
Subject: Re: /etc/hosts doesn't work ?
Date: 18 Oct 1995 16:36:33 +0100
Organization: interface business GmbH, Dresden
Lines: 22
Message-ID: <4636u1$7ff@ida.interface-business.de>
References: <45km75$av0@news.csie.nctu.edu.tw>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ida.interface-business.de

Simon Liu <jgliu@netrd.net.tw> wrote:

>     I have installed BSDi2.0 on my PC. But there is a problem :
>     "It can not find the host that is described in /etc/hosts, even
>       localhost. For example, I type "ping localhost" and system
>     return : unknown host "
>
>    What's wrong with my BSDi or what I need to setup ?

You've most likely been installing /etc/resolv.conf, and therefore
telling the system to use DNS first to resolve the host name.  If DNS
tells that a particular domain (host) name doesn't exist, /etc/hosts
will not be asked.  Only if DNS times out (instead of returning an
authoritative "No such domain" (NXDOMAIN) error), /etc/hosts will be
looked up as fallback.

I don't have an idea whether you could tell BSD/OS to change the
search order.  Other BSDs do this in /etc/host.conf.
-- 
J"org Wunsch					       Unix support engineer
joerg_wunsch@interface-business.de
					[private: http://www.sax.de/~joerg/]