[mythtv-users] localhost missing from /etc/hosts

Lan Barnes lan at falleagle.net
Fri May 11 18:25:34 UTC 2007


Last night I made a presentation on PostgreSQL on a newly installed laptop
(FC6). Even though local connections to the Postgres server had worked in
testing at home, it failed miserably in front of my audience.

(Stick with me, this pertains to Myth, honest ;)

After an inordinate period of debugging (with my abused audience watching
... third circle of geek hell), I/we discovered that my /etc/hosts was
missing the line

  127.0.0.1  localhost

Adding this line brought joy to all, and I blitzed through the
presentation in the time remaining. But I found it curious that the data
base server had intermittent performance w/o this line. Not all-works or
all-fails, just sometimes-works. Curious.

Now the Myth part. I run MythDora 3.2. Mostly it is a pussycat, but every
so often when I come down in the morning, I find that my schedule has lost
all its data overnight. I can immediately run mythfilldatabase by hand and
get it back, but if anything's scheduled and I don't correct this, I miss
the recording.

This happened about twice a week, randomly, and I had to check each morning.

So last night as I drove home, I saw the parallels. A randomly failing
data base server running on localhost. When I got back, I checked the myth
box's /etc/hosts, and lo and behold, it was missing the loopback line.

I have since added it, restarting the box, and we'll see if this
eliminates the missing schedules.

I share this because I think it's good to remember to check this simple
thing whenever MySQL is behaving squirrelly.

I have no idea how it happened on two machines -- I know better than to
leave that line out -- but perhaps when I brought the laptop up, I copied
the myth box's /etc/hosts over the network lazily and without noticing the
missing line. Why the line was missing from Myth I do not know. Maybe my
error. The usual RH verbiage about not deleting the line was at the top of
the file. A little mystery.

-- 
Lan Barnes

SCM Analyst              Linux Guy
Tcl/Tk Enthusiast        Biodiesel Brewer



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