diald auto-dial bug/feature

[<tko@westgac3.dragon.com>]

I asked on the list if anyone could tell me how to find what process was
connecting to a socket. lsof looked promising but did not work as advertised
in it's documentation. However, I did some detective work and found that
"diald" was the culprit. Here's how it happens:

diald is started by the init process
diald reads it configuratuion files
diald does a "gethostid()"
diald then compares the machine's hostname against the /etc/hosts file
(because of the /etc/resolv.conf file)

It is at this point where the problem starts!!

The default configuration for local IP address for diald is 127.0.0.1
However, "gethostid()" returns the hostname ('westgac3' in my case)
The hostname does not match the name for IP address 127.0.0.1 (which is
'localhost' in the /etc/hosts file)
Thus diald does a DNS request to resolve the hostname! And the endless
diald-ups start!

THE SOLUTION:
1) edit the /etc/hosts file and add your hostname behind the 'localhost'
 example:
 old '/etc/hosts'
 127.0.0.1  localhost

 new '/etc/hosts'
 127.0.0.1  localhost westgac3 << use the name returned by 'hostname'

2) Then reboot your system.
-- 
-= Sent by Debian 1.3 Linux =-
Thomas Kocourek  KD4CIK 
@_@tko@westgac3.dragon.com Remove @_@ for correct Email address
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