4 ms·
I have had a number of customers who have broken our applications, which have daemons listening on localhost, by editing their /etc/hosts files and removing the
by lambda 10y ago
I have had a number of customers who have broken our applications, which have daemons listening on localhost, by editing their /etc/hosts files and removing the localhost entry. I guess various people edit /etc/hosts to prevent applications from talking to licensing servers, and in the process happen to accidentally blow away the localhost entry (since these customers don't know what they're doing). We had this happen enough that we eventually stopped using "localhost" and started using 127.0.0.1 in our code.
- okket 10y agoLooks like we need eternal IPv4 support, if it is just for 127.0.0.1 :(
- theandrewbailey 10y agoI was expecting IPv4 to be around forever, for similar reasons that COBOL and the still emulated 8254 PC beep are: there's too much critical infrastructure using it.
- drzaiusapelord 10y agoHonestly, when could we ever retire IPv4? We've had, what three or four decades now, of building the world's infrastructure on it. What's a realistic scenario to retire that stuff even if everyone gets on IPv6 in 10 years. Another 50 years? 100? 500? Our great-great-grandkids will still be troubleshooting the 'hey who deleted localhost from /etc/hosts' problem.
- Raphmedia 10y agoWhile some people might edit their host for nefarious purposes, I think it's wrong to attribute all of it to malice. Personally, I set the host file to use https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts in order to block ads on every computers I touch. I also often use software that manage the host file and ignore the default physical file.
- syntheticnature 10y agoThe relevant part of the GP might be "since these customers don't know what they're doing."
- wolfgke 10y agoRelevant (source: http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/koans.html): A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.
- lambda 10y agoEvery one of the cases I have had to debug in which someone had deleted the localhost entry was someone who had entries for blocking Adobe's licensing servers.