Bob Goodwin wrote: > Ok, I read and reread the man page for hosts and hostname, etc. They > put very little light on the subject of configuring /et/hosts beyond the > ground rules that I am already familiar with. Removing the "box1" alias > from the first line results in a very slow reboot of the system, it > stalls on "sendmail" and "sm-client" for something on the order of a > minute on each one, adding "box1" reduces the entire boot process to > what seems like less than a minute on this old computer. Fine...but that is a different issue and is probably related to configuration of sendmail and sm-client. > The man page says nothing about aliases, just shows a few in the example > and it also seems to be saying that the host names must begin with a > "letter." "They must begin with an *_alphabetic*_ character and > end with an alphanumeric character." I suspect that's a typo and it > should read begin and end with alphanumeric character? It shouldn't have to say anything about aliases. Aliases are simply other names a system is known by. > 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain box1 > 10.1.1.2 box2 > 10.1.1.3 box3 > 10.1.1.4 box4 > 10.1.1.1 box1 > 192.168.1.226 box1 FWIW, the hosts file is used to determine the IP address of where you want to go. The file is used in looking up in very simple linear fashion. So, the last 2 lines are kind of meaningless since it is only the first match that is used. On "box1" type "ping box1" and you will always see that the loopback address of 127.0.0.1 is always used. > None of the above start with an "alphabetic" character but they work and > are in the default format? Notice that I had to tack "box1" onto line > one to get the boot process to work normally. Am I still doing > something else wrong? I'm not trying to be cantankerous, I would simply > like to know how to do this correctly. Is there a more definitive > explanation somewhere that I need to read? -- Since we have to speak well of the dead, let's knock them while they're alive. -- John Sloan
