Rebooting system resets /etc/hosts

English Network/Internet
#1

Hi,
since upgrade to suse 11.3 every time I reboot pc the file /etc/hosts is reset to default value. I am a web developer so I need to put in there my aliases for 127.0.0.1. It is annoying to do it again and again. Luckily, I don’t restart my system very often but still I would like to avoid that.

What should I do to stop this resetting? Or is there another place in 11.3 where should I put my entries?

#2

What are the contents of the file?

#3 
#
# hosts         This file describes a number of hostname-to-address
#               mappings for the TCP/IP subsystem.  It is mostly
#               used at boot time, when no name servers are running.
#               On small systems, this file can be used instead of a
#               "named" name server.
# Syntax:
#    
# IP-Address  Full-Qualified-Hostname  Short-Hostname
#

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost

# special IPv6 addresses
::1             localhost ipv6-localhost ipv6-loopback

fe00::0         ipv6-localnet

ff00::0         ipv6-mcastprefix
ff02::1         ipv6-allnodes
ff02::2         ipv6-allrouters
ff02::3         ipv6-allhosts
127.0.0.2       redBook.redBook redBook

This is the default value. However I want to change the line starting 127.0.0.1 to something like…

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost myweb1 myweb2 myweb2

…but it disappears every time I reboot the system.

#4

Not sure what’s doing that, may depend on your network settings, but you can work around it by binding those names for another loopback address, like this:

127.0.0.2 myweb1 myweb2 myweb3

In fact you can see an example of that in the file you posted. All the 2^24-2 addresses in 127.0.0.0/8 are equally good for a loopback address.

#5

Hello tobice,

Have you checked if “Change hostname via DHCP” is set in YaST?

Go to YaST – Network Settings – Hosname/DNS tab and see if the above settings box is ticked.

If it is then hopefully unchecking it will stop the problem.

Worth a try.

Cheers,

T

#6

And I would do it again by editing /etc/hosts? You think that if I put the names just on another line it won’t disappear? I don’t see any reason :slight_smile:

Unfortunately I am uploading some big stuff on the net so I won’t be able to restart my system and try it in the next few hours.

#7

It has been already unchecked so this not the cause of this problem however thanks for the idea :slight_smile:

#8

It may be netconfig that’s regenerating the lines so you may have to change it in YaST, and define an alias rather than change the localhost entry. I use ifup so I have control over /etc/hosts. Also things may have changed in 11.3, I’m still on 11.2 on this machine.

#9

Where should I look for netconfig in Yast? I have openSuse in Czech language so the names are a little bit different. Btw I am using networkmanager for network configuration so there also might be a problem. However in 11.2 it worked nicely even with NM so something has changed probably.

#10

YaST > Network Devices > Network Settings probably.

#11

Weird, I really don’t know why, but it DOES work! I used 127.0.0.2 instead of 127.0.0.1 and it doesn’t get removed after reboot. So thank you, problem solved :slight_smile: