/etc/hosts - specify host name with domain

[mr. N.V. (Nitin) Mehta]

During Oracle Apps 11i install, it is recomanded to specify Host and domain name in /etc/hosts file for the server.

Currently the entry in /etc/hosts looks like the following

172.16.159.124 nlmc137

Can I change it to include domain name like the following and change the node name also
with old node name as extra alias?

172.16.159.124 odcdev.odc.ey.nl nlmc137

Do I need to make any other changes?

Regards,
Nitin Mehta.

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

The /etc/hosts entry as you have shown it should work just fine. See the man pages for 'hosts'.

...JRF...

[John Palmer]

There's no problem with having the fully qualified name and alias(es) in /etc/hosts. It's only a lookup table for converting IP address < - > hostname.

Shouldn't your fully qualified name be:-
nlmc137.odcdev.odc.ey.nl

rather than odcdev.odc.ey.nl which I suspect is your domain name or is nlmc137 an alias for odcdev?

[Chris Garman]

There is no way to be sure that is all you have to change. There may be other applications on your system that query the hostname in a manner that uses the hosts file. These apps will now get a different name and may have problems. I had to reconfigure Omniback after updating the hosts file.

[Byron Myers]

Also verify that "hosts" appears before "dns" in your /etc/nsswitch.conf file.