Fargusson.Alan wrote:
Sorry, I can't do anything about they way my mailer replies. Exchange
administrators handle all of that.
I think we have lost site of the question I was addressing. You should have an
entry in /etc/hosts for you system, which should be the same as the one in DNS
if you have DNS. This entry for the system name is not required though. The
IP address in /etc/hosts can be a 127.* address, or it can be the real IP
address of you system. If the entry in /etc/hosts is the real IP address it
must be routed to the loopback interface because real hardware does not send
and receive at the same time, so without the route to the loopback interface
you cannot access your system from your system. Note that virtual networks may
not have this restriction.
It seems pretty likely that the information in entry shown in this
thread is _not_ the same as DNS would provide.
So: the question of which IP address goes into /etc/hosts makes no difference
to the question of will things work locally if the interface is down. Some
seem to be seeing some odd behavior of the loopback interface if the eth
interface is down, so perhaps you would get what you want either way. It
occurs to me that perhaps the eth and lo drivers in Linux are linked in some
way, so maybe it doesn't matter if you don't route the local IP to the loopback
interface. This might explain what some are seeing.
If the eth interface is down, the system will not talk to anyone. If it
has the bogus information above for the resolver to respond with, it
might boot quickly and appear, locally, to be working when in fact it's not.
If the resolver can't get answers and times out, booting will be slow
and the problem abundantly clear.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375
You cannot reply off-list:-)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
