[Xastir] VNC

[Jason Winningham]

On Oct 19, 2006, at 6:16 AM, Dan Brown wrote:

> This may be a bit of a "in my opinion" kinda thing, but you  
> probably only
> want change the localhost line if you're not connected to a network  
> - and
> maybe not even then.  You'd probably want to leave the localhost  
> line alone
> and leave it in the hosts file.

I'll echo part of what Dan said, only a little more emphatically:   
make sure that the name localhost never ever EVER points to any  
address other than 127.0.0.1, and make sure that 127.0.0.1 has  
localhost as the name or at least an alias.  localhost/127.0.0.1 is a  
loopback address - it's how your system talks to itself.  If it can't  
talk to itself, it will immediately go insane. (:

I've spent many fun hours tracking down a network problem that ended  
up being localhost mapping to some IP that wasn't the loopback  
address (127.0.0.1).  Somehow this bit of happiness got propagated  
all over the network (due to some aspect of XNS that I don't recall  
at the moment).

This is one of the really annoying things about linux: the _machine_  
should have a name that's independent of the network interface's IP  
address.  Between the linux behavior and DHCP, the hostname can be  
hard to nail down. ):

-Jason
kg4wsv