Could not look up internet address

Mr Mister · 08-26-2004, 02:46 PM

When I try to log into GNOME, I get the error message saying "Could not look up internet address for iws-pllnx01.internal.local. This will prevent GNOME from operating correctly. It may be possible to correct the problem by adding iws-pllnx01.internal.local to the file /etc/hosts."

I have read through many other threads regarding this problem and I've tried many many different ways of adding my host name to the hosts file. Right now the hosts file has:

127.0.0.1 localhost
10.224.36.84 iws-pllnx01.internal.local iws-pllnx01

I cannot connect to the Internet, but it seems to still be on the LAN because I can connect to it through other computers on the network. The strange thing is I used to be able to connect to the Internet without a problem and I did not change any of the configuration. This problem just happened one time when I went to log in. The output of ifconfig contains the IP address I have in the hosts file.

I'm trying to think of everything I did the last time I was able to log in successfully. I FTPed some files using gFTP and I noticed that when I reboot it says shutting down proftpd failed. I don't know if anything I did there could be related.

Anyway I'm stumped. Any advise would be appreciated.

I'm using Mandrake 9.2

Thanks

chrism01 · 08-26-2004, 03:55 PM

Check your /etc/resolv.conf.
It should have the IP numeric addresses of your main DHCP/DNS server and the 2 (usually) DNS servers owned by your ISP.

foo_bar_foo · 08-26-2004, 05:54 PM

hi,
i think go ahead and put those names after the 127.0.0.1 entry as well making localhost last
also i think give us the results of the "route" command (run it as root)

Mr Mister · 08-27-2004, 10:46 AM

Thanks for the help. It does seem like a DNS problem. I can ping another machine using the IP address but I cannot ping it using the machine's name.

I checked /etc/resolv.conf and it has one nameserver entry which I assume is the correct DNS server since I never changed it. However, I should try to confirm that and (hopefully) I'm wrong.

Is there anything else I could check that would cause DNS to fail?

The output of route is:

Code:

Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway        Genmask               Flags     Metric     Ref     Use     Iface
10.224.36.0     *              225.225.225.0         U         0          0       0       eth0
127.0.0.1       *              225.0.0.0             U         0          0       0       lo
default         10.224.36.1    0.0.0                 UG        0          0       0       eth0

Mr Mister · 09-01-2004, 10:05 AM

Looks like this thread is dead, but I thought I'd post this reply in case anyone Googles here with the same problem I was having. Turns out it was a DNS issue. I had the wrong server name in my /etc/resolv.conf file. Once I put in the correct DNS server, it worked.

If you are getting that error when you log in and your /etc/hosts file is correct, check /etc/resolv.conf.

Thanks to the guys who replied to this thread and helped me pinpoint the issue.

renatore · 01-11-2010, 03:54 PM

i had the same problem in karmic koala 9.10.

I solved it this way:

it happened after echoing in the root account - i know, i know...
i changed the look of ma hostname or something i don't know what,
anyway, when i tried to login to xfce it wasn't working allright, got that same message.
it was connecting to the net and all, but there was no posibility to logout, reboot, shutdown from xfcs, had to login to tty1 as root and kill xorg....

In the gnome, lxde, openbox window managers all worked well and normally.

so, after reading and trying a lot of stuff found here and there
and none of them worked, i looked in my home folder with the
view of hidden files.

in the folder .wapi, i found two files, that had the name of host i
created during the installation of my xubuntu. i realized, that that
was the name i have to put in my /etc/hosts file, so i did it,
rebooted (dunno if that was necessary, but i deleted my wingdoze
just this week to put my home on that partition, so i'm a little used to that still )

After restart, all went normally, xfce started withot that message and with the xfce
session chooser, which was gone during the login's with error.

hope that this will help someone, messing around as i did, trying to change hostname
in the terminal as root, not knowing what it can do.

don't do it in your root account guyz, alright??