Thanks heaps to all the responses I got:
Brion Leary, Eric R. Ramelli, Rich Casto, Dan Brainard, Asim Zuberi,
Nickolai Zeldovich, Toby Potts, Glenn Satchell, Parthiv Shah, Shriman Gurung,
Peter M Allan, Casper Dik, Stefan Voss, Christine Komma.
My original question:
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If my /etc/nodename is xyz, can I have my machine name in /etc/hosts:
a.b.c.d xyz.company.com
a.b.c.d xyz
a.b.c.d loghost
like this? Will the ordering of these lines matter? We're running 2.5.1 with
"files dns" in nsswitch.conf.
We're trying to work around a software error and the vendor suggested us
to do the above.
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A point of clarification is needed. My current /etc/hosts has:
a.b.c.d xyz.company.com xyz loghost
instead of the splitted lines and has been working for the last 3 years.
>From the responses, my current /etc/hosts is the correct way to approach
things. However, the splitted approach may also work, from Toby Potts:
you can have your entries listed in the manner which you have
outlined, however, be careful not to switch the order. some software
packages read this file to get the hostname (not sure why here) and if
you change the order, the software configuration will not recognize
the "new" hostname. we had this problem with Legato Networker and the
same with OpenVision Netbackup, after one of our admins mistakenly
switched the order of the lines in the /etc/hosts file. This hostname
information is contained in several different files throughout the
system,
(these are probably of some interest)
/etc/nodename
/etc/hostname.??[0-9]
/etc/hosts ---> /etc/inet/hosts
/etc/net/*/hosts
/var/yp/aliases
/var/yp/binding/*/ypservers
and each software developer seems to code to look at a different file for
this information
Thanks for your help,
Kai
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