Strange behavior of /etc/hosts

It's not a Directory Services problem. I add records to /etc/hosts on all of my Macs, and have never had to modify Directory Services.

LittleSaint wrote:
It's not a Directory Services problem.

It is not a "problem" at all.

I add records to /etc/hosts on all of my Macs, and have never had to modify Directory Services.

Are all your Macs configured identically to that of the original poster? Of course they aren't. Clearly something is different about your machines. Just saying "it works for me" is not a solution. I have given the original poster two clear-cut solutions and some things to look at to try to figure out exactly what is happening with /etc/hosts, if so desired.

LittleSaint wrote:
The OP has a legitimate question about something that should and does work just fine under Mac OS X

That is clearly an illogical statement. Yes, the original poster has a legitimate question. But if it really did "work just fine" then why would the original poster even be asking?

so far you've offered absolutely nothing to help solve it.

Complaining about me isn't helping anyone.

Moreover, you really need to do some research on host files, DNS, and DHCP before commenting anymore.

No, I don't, because I don't care. If someone wants to learn about exactly how MacOS X handles name lookups, by all means they should. Personally, I don't want to bother with it. That's why I suggest an easy solution with DHCP and Bonjour.

It's only making you look bad.

I'm not here to look pretty.

etresoft wrote:
Complaining about me isn't helping anyone.

Captain Report Button has spoken.

mcs37 wrote:
I'd be happy to use whatever the preferred solution is, I'm just used to editing /etc/hosts since I deal with Linux every week.

What is the preferred solution in 10.6 for adding static IP entries to my local host database?

On all of our machines, editing /etc/hosts does the trick. There must be something different about the configuration of your machine. If I run "dscacheutil -configuration", I get:

DirectoryService Cache search policy:
/Local/Default
/BSD/local

What do you get? I suspect the first line is going to say something more interesting than mine. The idea is that you can store your local DNS entries in the network database for all machines instead of having to add them to each machine one at a time.

Now, I don't have a real network, so I'm well within the realm of pure speculation in this matter. I suspect that is the cause and I suspect that if you edit the network hosts settings via dscl you will fix the problem for all machines. If, however, that doesn't work, you can still use dscl to add those entries into your local DNS table instead of /etc/hosts. You can script that and have launchd reset it every time you boot up. That isn't an ideal solution, but it should work. I do something similar with my VPN connection.

Hi mcs37,

are you sure that editing /etc/hosts doesn't work? Please check your entry with "dscacheutil -q host -a name <hostname>"...

For example if you added the following to /etc/hosts:

+10.0.0.1 blabla.com+

this command:

+dscacheutil -q host -a name blabla.com+

should give:

+name: blabla.com+
+ip_address: 10.0.0.1+

DHCP in large organizations tends to fall apart under stress. Static IP's minimize dependence on the
org's infrastructure and simplify troubleshooting or reconfiguration when there are problems.

For small to medium outfits, Bonjour, Apple's implementation of zeroconf <http://zeroconf.org/> is dead simple and (contrary to OP's impression) works very well in mixed environments. Recent linux distros use the avahi implementation <avahi.org>.