From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040706 Firefox/0.9 (but why does that matter?) Description of problem: The default /etc/hosts file isn't in the correct format. According to 'man hosts', our own documentatation, GLS training material, and the RFC, the format is as follows: IP_address canonical_hostname aliases ... from the man page: "Aliases provide for name changes, alternate spellings, shorter hostnames, or generic hostnames (for example, localhost)." Our current file is as follows: 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain I.e, the alias is before the canonical hostname. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install RHEL 2.Look at default /etc/hosts file 3.Compare to documentation Actual Results: The file is in the wrong format - the alias is in the first column, the canonical_hostname is in the second. Expected Results: The file should be as documented. Additional info: Hope I got the component right - if not, please change accordingly. Thanks guys.
*** Bug 128459 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This has been this way for years now. Unfortunately, doing anything else causes things to break in environments where you are at all disconnected from a network (ie, your dhcp server is down or you're on a laptop or anything like that)
Thanks for the quick response. Tho it sounds more like WONTFIX than NOTABUG. Could you provide more detail about what breaks? Maybe that should be fixed too?
Services such as httpd, sendmail, etc which count on the hostname being correct. Also, X was known to break (although it was less common). The details are a little fuzzy to me at this point since it's been about 3.5 years since the last time I had this discussion and that was with ewt and msw :)
Interesting. I've been fixing this for classes and I havenb't run into too many problems, using either localhost or localhost.localdomain to refer to services including httpd and postfix. X works fine too. Could we fix this in a test release? If httpd or sendmail have a problem with a correctly specified hosts file, then it should be resolved easily.
You're not going to see the problem in classes where you have workstations that are perpetually connected. It's a major problem on laptops, especially when pcmcia gets thrown into the mix.