Re: What goes in /etc/hosts?

Brian Fahrlander wrote:

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 20:19 -0500, fredex wrote:

It makes no rhyme nor reason for me as to why RH installer or
network config tools set up /etc/hosts the way they do (as you
describe above). It clearly doesn't work right.

I always find I have to manually fix it. The correct form
should be like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain 192.168.0.1 myhost myhost.mydomain

unless your machine is assigned an address by dhcp, in which
case use only the first line.

   The 127.0.0.1 line should always read "localhost.localdomain
localhost" unless you're doing something fancy routing things to a
special 127.0.0.* type address. (I've never needed it; don't know why)

   But when it comes to _naming_ your IP address, consider that
'reserved' IP spans can't truly be named "fred.amazon.com" (for
example), because:

1) you're not part of amazon.com and 2) no one's gonna be able to route to this reserved IP address.

I use a simple way to get around this: Everything in 192.168.1.* has
a name like aquila.fahrlander.local, and my webserver is both
www.fahrlander.net (on the outside) and pip.fahrlander.net on the
inside.

   So decide what you want your machines to be called and append .local
after it.  Put those in /etc/hosts in case the DNS can't be called, and
you should be really happy.  This makes for a robust system that's
clearly understood.

Enjoy!

When you say append .local, is that referring to all machines on the local net, or only to this one local host. In other words, for the other hosts on the lan, do I also need to append .local?
Thanks;
-nat