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Dale Smith
Asked: 2019-06-27 15:16:08 +0800 CST

/etc/hosts not working

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I populated /etc/hosts with device names and IP addresses. For example:

chassisOne     10.0.0.1
chassisTwo     10.0.0.2
.
.
.
etcetera.

I am able to ping the IP address of both chassisOne and chassisTwo. Pinging the hostname returns:

ping: unknown host chassisOne

My nsswitch.conf file is:

host:   files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns

What am I missing?

server dns hosts

2 Answers

  1. From man hosts:

    This manual page describes the format of the /etc/hosts file. This file is a simple text file that associates IP addresses with hostnames, one line per IP address. For each host a single lineshould be present with the following information:

    IP_address canonical_hostname [aliases...]

    Thus, 

    chassisOne     10.0.0.1

    is wrong.

    It should be

    10.0.0.1 chassisOne
    • 39

  2. You're writing it in the wrong order, the ip is supposed to go before the domain.

    Try using this instead:

    10.0.0.1 facebook.com
10.0.0.2 google.com

    Then when you navigate to facebook.com or google.com on your browser, it'll display the following error:

    Firefox Error Screen

    Good luck.

    • 1