[CentOS] /etc/hosts - hostname alias for 127.0.0.1

Sean Carolan scarolan at gmail.com
Mon Mar 7 16:49:18 UTC 2011


> First, if your host is actually communicating with any kind of ip-based
> network, it is quite certain, that 127.0.0.1 simply isn't his IP
> address. And, at least for me, that's a fairly good reason.

Indeed.  It does seem like a bad idea to have a single host using
loopback, while the rest of the network refers to it by it's real IP
address.

> Second, sendmail had the habit of breaking if your hostname was mapped
> to 127.0.0.1, but I stopped using sendmail a decade ago, so I can't
> verify this. :)

The reason this came up is because one of our end-users requested such
a setup in the /etc/hosts file, and I didn't think it was a good idea.
 Seems it would be better to fix the application(s) that require the
data to use the real network IP address.



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