[ILUG] Who stole my localhost ?

[Timothy Murphy]

My laptop does not seem to know the address of localhost,
even though it is given in /etc/hosts .
Also the other machines on my little LANs seem to have no problem:
=======================================
[tim at william etc]$ telnet localhost smtp
telnet: localhost: Temporary failure in name resolution
localhost: Host name lookup failure
[tim at william etc]$ telnet 127.0.0.1 smtp
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.
=======================================
[tim at helen ~]$ telnet localhost smtp
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 helen.murphy.ie ESMTP Sendmail 8.13.1/8.13.1; Fri, 10 Dec 2004 18:37:36 
GMT
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.
=======================================

Where does telnet get the address of localhost
if not from /etc/hosts ?
=======================================
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   localhost localhost.murphy.ie
=======================================

The only difference I know between william and helen
is that william is using dhcp (dhclient, I suppose) to connect to the world -
but could that affect matters?
Both machines are running Fedora-3.

As always, I await the bottomless wisdom of the ILUG gurus.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland