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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.caldera.com!enews.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!news.internetMCI.com!news-admin From: Chris Marsey <cmarsey@scouter.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: order of named and hosts Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 13:11:43 -0700 Organization: InternetMCI Lines: 31 Message-ID: <328393FF.E23@scouter.com> References: <55la8h$ce@kauss.rhein-main.de> <3280BD53.41C67EA6@by.by> NNTP-Posting-Host: 166.37.15.46 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (WinNT; I) Cyril A. Vechera wrote: > Initial setup is like that: > bind > hosts > > and I don't understand why... > As a system admin, if I add a new system and need to connect to it before it has a DNS entry, a /etc/hosts entry would be quickly made on the system accessing it for ease of use. Two months later that new system (earlier) changes it's IP for some reason like moved to another router segment or something. The new IP is put into DNS. If hosts was checked first, the machine with the bad IP will have problems connecting to it. It will never try the DNS lookup since it's in the hosts files. One other reason that comes to mind (and occurred to me once) is if someone adds a /etc/hosts entry for an IP they want to get to and uses a machine name for it that is used on the corporate domain already. If another user tries to get to that corporate name, it will go to the overridden name in the hosts file and the user may take quite a while to figure out what's going on. (local system admins can be given write access to the hosts file but the resolv.conf can be restricted to the corporate sys admin.) Chris Marsey