can't resolve localhost
 

Hello,
I cannot ping my oun machine by using the hostname. It will work fine using the IP.
Typing hostname will give me the correct hostname. The /etc/hosts has all the correct entries. Can someone give me a clue as to how to fix it? Thanks very much!

Is the loopback device up?
ifconfig

Yes, the lo device 127.0.0.1 is up.

What do you have in your hosts file:
cat /etc/hosts

As I said, the /etc/hosts file is fine and no change to it will correct the problem. Here it is anyway... This has always worked, but now I can't ping linea.

127.0.0.1 linea localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.103 linea

The problem has something to do with the resolver and is not a typical tweak. Thanks for taking shots at it.

Are you able to ping "localhost"? If not, you might have a problem with your nsswitch.conf file.

Nope, can't ping localhost. Here is my nsswitch.conf file. In "hosts:" I moved "nis" to the end of the line so it would be sure to find "files" . Nada.

passwd: compat
group: compat

hosts: files dns nis

services: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
networks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
protocols: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
rpc: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
ethers: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
netmasks: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
netgroup: nis
bootparams: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
publickey: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files
automount: files
aliases: nis [NOTFOUND=return] files

What is the exact error message when you try to ping "localhost". Also, please post the output of your resolv.conf file.

[root@linea root]# ping localhost
ping: unknown host localhost

cat /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 63.249.95.8
nameserver 63.249.95.9
nameserver 192.168.1.1

Seems like resolv.conf would be the problem but I have my router and 2 DNS servers listed.

When I boot up I get," Could not look up Internet address for linea. It may be possible to correct this problem by adding lines to /etc/hosts.

Thanks

First of all what distro are you using? I think there maybe an error in your /etc/hosts file. You can try renaming it and then re-entering it manually into a new file. Sometimes there's a file corruption of some type that can't be seen visually.

I'm using RedHat 9.
Tried eliminating any possable errors in the hosts file by creating another manually. No difference.
I did notice that I can't ping anything in the host file. The /etc/hosts file is not being read, even when I create a new one with just a couple of lines.
This all started when I attempted to upgrade MySql and found I had to also upgrade the libraries... This must have screwed up something relating to the resolver.
Thanks for your Ideas and feedback aznluvsmc.

Do you know what libraries you upgraded?

Are you using nscd? Try turning it off then ping:
service nscd stop
ping localhost

127.0.0.1 linea localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.103 linea
_____________________________
can u remove linea in the second coloumn and try..
something like

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
192.168.1.103 linea

Not running nscd. The /etc/hosts file isn't read no matter what is listed in any order. It must have something to do with ld.so, glibc or libc libraries as these are the aRPMs I attempted to upgrade. Tried doing a Redhat upgrade, but now think I'll have to do a complete install which is overkill to fix a broken library. Thanks.