telnet doesn't find localhost

[Jeronimo Pellegrini <pellegrini@mpcnet.com.br>]

Hello...

  This is probably a known problem. I checked the BTS some time ago,
  and tehre was a bug filed against telnet, I guess... It couldn't
  resolve "localhost".

  Anyway... I still have that problem, and the telnet package was
  upgraded (and there wasnt anything in the changelog), so I think it
  must have been some oterh package. I tried netkit and a few otehrs,
  but didn't find the bug.

  But it is still a problem here... I can connect to socrates (which
  *is* localhost), but not to localhost.

  I did not touch my /etc/hosts file recently, except that some
  upgrade did add some ipv6 related stuff there... So I have no idea
  why this happens. This is a dialup box, and this is what I have in
  my /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1       socrates        localhost loghost

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
# (added automatically by netbase upgrade)

::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts


Now, look what happens:

 socrates tmp$ telnet socrates 80
 Trying 127.0.0.1...
 Connected to socrates.
 Escape character is '^]'. 

 socrates tmp$ telnet localhost 80
 telnet: could not resolve localhost/80: Temporary failure in name resolution


Yet, ping doesn't seem to be affected by that:


 socrates tmp$ ping localhost
 PING socrates (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0.1 ms

 socrates tmp$ ping socrates
 PING socrates (127.0.0.1): 56 data bytes
 64 bytes from 127.0.0.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=0.1 ms


I am a bit confused. man 5 hosts didn't help...

Any ideas?

Thanks,
J.

-- 
Jeronimo Pellegrini
Institute of Computing - Unicamp - Brazil
http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~jeronimo
mailto:jeronimo@ic.unicamp.br    mailto:pellegrini@iname.com