Hosts Package Oddity ...

[bob selby]

I saw some very strange behaviour from my installation of the "hosts" package last night. It did an auto update at about 9pm but then I noticed that I suddenly had VERY limited conectivity - I couldnt even get to Google.

A quick look at the hosts file didnt reveal anything obvious but I was getting my arse chewed by my wife and daughter about needing the net to finish some work so I just disabled the package and forced an update then re-enabled the package and it all sprung into life.

I'm guessing that the hosts file got corrupted in some way.

Any ideas/comments/suggestions ??

TIA Bob

[Lightning]

Any ideas/comments/suggestions ??

In your situation which I have been in before I would strongly suggest disabling the auto update which is in the "crond" configuration and just do updates manually so that you can watch it happen. Most likely the file was corrupted because something else tried to access the file while it was being written and caused the DNS server to basically crash. The other option which I used on my own system for a while was to update at about 4AM on Sunday to ensure nothing is accessing the files.

[bob selby]

OK - It's the first time its happened - I'll keep an eye on it and see what happens.

I prefer the auto-update - but if its going to cause problems then I'll have to do it manually as you suggest.

Thx
Bob