hosts
SYNOPSIS
/etc/hosts
DESCRIPTION
This manual page describes the format of the /etc/hosts
file. This file is a simple text file that associates IP
addresses with hostnames, one line per IP address. For
each host a single line should be present with the follow
ing information:
IP_address canonical_hostname aliases
Fields of the entry are separated by any number of blanks
and/or tab characters. Text from a "#" character until the
end of the line is a comment, and is ignored. Host names
may contain only alphanumeric characters, minus signs
("-"), and periods ("."). They must begin with an alpha
betic character and end with an alphanumeric character.
Aliases provide for name changes, alternate spellings,
shorter hostnames, or generic hostnames (for example,
localhost). The format of the host table is described in
RFC 952.
The Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) Server implements
the Internet name server for UNIX systems. It augments or
replaces the /etc/hosts file or host name lookup, and
frees a host from relying on /etc/hosts being up to date
and complete.
In modern systems, even though the host table has been
superseded by DNS, it is still widely used for:
bootstrapping
Most systems have a small host table containing the
name and address information for important hosts on
the local network. This is useful when DNS is not
running, for example during system bootup.
NIS Sites that use NIS use the host table as input to
the NIS host database. Even though NIS can be used
with DNS, most NIS sites still use the host table
with an entry for all local hosts as a backup.
isolated nodes
Very small sites that are isolated from the network
use the host table instead of DNS. If the local
information rarely changes, and the network is not
connected to the Internet, DNS offers little advan
tage.
EXAMPLE
127.0.0.1 localhost
there are historical hosts.txt files on the WWW. I just
found three, from 92, 94, and 95.
FILES
/etc/hosts
SEE ALSO
hostname(1) resolver(3), resolver(5), hosts(5), host
name(7), named(8), Internet RFC 952
AUTHOR
This manual page was written by Manoj Srivastava <sri
vasta@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system.
Debian 2002-06-16 HOSTS(5)
|