/etc/hosts being wrongly updated by network utility

[videogenie]

I spent some time fixing a mailserver problem on Ubuntu yesterday, whereby it had lost its FQDN (hostname -f). What had happened was from the /etc/hosts had been wrongly updated following an IP address change within the network utility.

It had overwritten the /etc/hosts entry like this, by inserting an unwanted FQDN...

192.168.0.100 mail.ubuntu.com mail.ubuntu.com mail

This is a fault within the network utility I guess.

[Bemk]

Are you running a desktop environment? I have my graphic environment resetting my DNS settings to default, while I want them to be custom (my ISP is not really reliable at this moment). My server without graphical environment doesn't notice anything of it, because it stays the way I set it.

By the way, do you have a back-up?

[videogenie]

Yes, I'm running the network utility, which is a graphical interface. Basically it just corrupts the /etc/hosts by adding an extra FQDN in...

192.168.0.100 mail.domain.com mail.domain.com dellpc

It is a bug, because the format should be this...

192.168.0.100 mail.domain.com dellpc


I certainly do like Ubuntu but networking is not quite up to standard. I'm able to reproduce some strange things in Ubuntu's networking, but having said that, once it is configured and working, it stays that way. Unlike Micro$oft.

[Bemk]

What did the trick with me was running a script every time I booted, which would copy the correct settings to the correct location and then rebooting /etc/init.d/networking.

It's not ideal but for me it did the trick. Since then I have done a serious f*ck up of my system and had to reinstall. That did the trick as well, but I'm sure there must be better ways to do it (by the way, the problem came back because the problem is at my router).