Description of problem: Setting up networking after a clean install of FC3 can cause a previously normal copy of /etc/hosts to be truncated to 0 bytes. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): system-config-network-1.3.22-1 How reproducible: always (but I don't know the exact steps necessary) Steps to Reproduce: 1. Do a clean install of FC3 using default hostname localhost.localdomain. Verify that /etc/hosts is the following: # Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 2. Configure a dial-up modem and corresponding network connection. Actual results: /etc/hosts truncated to 0 bytes. This leads to the error message when logging in Could not look up internet address for localhost.localdomain. This will prevent GNOME from operating correctly. It may be possible to correct the problem by adding localhost.localdomain to the file /etc/hosts. (or something to this effect). Expected results: /etc/hosts should be unchanged. Additional info: This bug report is secondhand. My father did a clean install of FC3 on two basically identical machines, one with an internal and one with an external modem. After configuring networking the above problem was observed on the first machine (and fixed by editing /etc/hosts). Immediately after installing on the 2nd machine, we verified that /etc/hosts was correct. But after configuring networking, the problem occurred again. It seemed likely that configuring networking was the cause. I observed that on my own machine, the modification time on /etc/hosts is exactly the same as that of the files ifcfg-* in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts created during network configuration, indicating that system-config-network does in fact manipulate this file (though in my case, /etc/hosts remained normal). Unfortunately, I don't know exactly the steps he took resulting in the problem, but whatever they were, it's reproducible.
do you have selinux turned on or off?
All machines mentioned have the default selinux configuration (on). Also forgot to mention that on my machine (which didn't experience the problem) I configured xDSL, while on both of my father's (which did) he configured dialup. Also, my machine is ethernet capable and his aren't. On all of these machines, the default localhost.localdomain is used, so the original /etc/hosts was exactly the 3 lines above.
ok, this is it... Thx for spotting this bug, and sorry it bit you!
This bug is now occurring in a clean install of FC4. I verified that the modification time on the empty /etc/hosts file is exactly the same as the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* file created when my father's dialup configuration is set up, and the error did not occur before the dialup config was done. Please upgrade this bug to FC4.
This report targets the FC3 or FC4 products, which have now been EOL'd. Could you please check that it still applies to a current Fedora release, and either update the target product or close it ? Thanks.
I'm updating to FC5 since I'm not absolutely sure it happened in FC6, but am quite sure it happened in FC5.
Just helped my father do a clean install of F7, and verified that configuring a modem connection still truncates /etc/hosts to 0 bytes (fortunately, we made a copy in advance). Updating to F7.
Also, as reported earlier, configuring an xDSL connection doesn't seem to truncate /etc/hosts, though configuring a modem connection does. The behavior hasn't changed.
My father installed on a second machine, and this time it did not truncate /etc/hosts. On the first machine, where /etc/hosts was truncated, he had an internal modem on ttyS1, which was automatically detected by s-c-network. On the second machine, where it was not truncated, he had an external modem on ttyS0, which was not automatically detected (even though it was connected and turned on), so he manually changed "/dev/modem" to "/dev/ttyS0", after which it worked properly. Other than that, the procedure on both machines was exactly the same.
system-config-network-1.4.7-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report. If you want to test the update, you can install it with su -c 'yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update system-config-network'
My father yesterday did a clean install of F8, and configuring the modem didn't wipe /etc/hosts as happened with earlier Fedora versions (this only pertains to the original system-config-network-1.4.3-1.fc8, of course).
system-config-network-1.4.7-1.fc8 has been pushed to the Fedora 8 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.