Bug#267321: Debian installer and /etc/hosts

[Thomas Hood <jdthood@aglu.demon.nl>]

John Summerfield wrote:
> I'll go further too and propose that sudo's hehaviour is broken. It 
> should not be trying to resolve $HOSTNAME if there's no external 
> network: note that if there's no external network that implies the
> user has local access. Test rules for 127.0.0.1 by all means.
> The brokenness of sudo is no reason to break even more software.


Bdale Garbee has already addressed this accusation in his comment to
bug report #266209:
> One of the features of sudo is the ability to express permissions across 
> hosts, which results in sudo wanting to be able to do DNS lookups on the
> current host.  
> 
> If you want this to work with less delay when the network isn't accessible,
> you should investigate the options provided by the nsswitch.conf file to have 
> a working gethostbyname() capability even when DNS servers aren't reachable.


John Summerfield continued:
> If there is no external network, then the behaviour of programs such as 
> ping, telnet, ssh are irrelevant. All are of limited use without a 
> functioning network.

That isn't entirely true.  Some programs use the loopback interface to
provide/use services locally.
--
Thomas Hood