localhost.localdomain. internet address problem

windycity_linux · 03-27-2007, 12:42 AM

I am getting this warning message after i enter the user name and passwd to log in. I am using RHEL 4 with GNOME desktop, the machine has dynamic ip with dhcp. Every thing works fine (ie internet connection). Any help will be appreciated.

"Could not look up internet address for localhost.localdomain.
This will prevent GNOME from operating correctly.
It may be possible to correct the problem by adding
localhost.localdomain to the file /etc/hosts."

I checked the /etc/hosts file, it was empty. I experimented by adding this line

"localhost.localdomain. 127.0.0.1"

Any help will be appreciated. thanks

blackhole54 · 03-27-2007, 03:42 AM

I think you were close. I am running Ubuntu which uses Gnome. The following lines were present in /etc/hosts (before I started mucking with it!):

Code:

127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 <hostname>

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

The <hostname> in the second line is the contents of the the /etc/hostname file. Just to give you a heads up, I seriously broke Gnome by altering /etc/hostname w/o changing the corresponding entry in /etc/hosts. After altering /etc/hosts so they matched, all was well again.

windycity_linux · 03-28-2007, 03:26 AM

thanks for your reply - i was still getting the error msg even after my experiment; most probably because i need to change the order i entered the info (ip address first then localhost). I will update if changing the order will solve the problem.

It was a new installation, i wonder why the entry was not made in the /etc/hosts file. The only possible reason i could think of is the machine had a very old amd ethernet card that it did not detect util Kudzu hardware detection was ran after the installation. just my thought.

blackhole54 · 03-28-2007, 10:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by windycity_linux

thanks for your reply - i was still getting the error msg even after my experiment; most probably because i need to change the order i entered the info (ip address first then localhost). I will update if changing the order will solve the problem.

Definately change the order. And I think you will need that second line I posted for Gnome to work properly. (Lack of it seems to cause DBus problems, and inability to launch programs.)

Quote:

It was a new installation, i wonder why the entry was not made in the /etc/hosts file. The only possible reason i could think of is the machine had a very old amd ethernet card that it did not detect util Kudzu hardware detection was ran after the installation. just my thought.

Sounds like a reasonable conjecture to me.