Linux not reading the /etc/hosts file
December 21, 2021 Written By Marco Monteiro
This week I restarted my laptop. That does not happen too often. Mostly when I let the batery run out for some reason. So when I got back into the system I ran into a weird one. My /etc/hosts file was not being read.
Let’s say I did:
$ ping localhost
Everything was working out as it should. However I had quite a few more host rules there. like
127.0.0.1 foo.loc
However when I tried to ping foo.loc it was not working at all. Tried to flush my DNS cache and nothing was working. Then I ran into a post on stackoverflow that did the following solution was to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf file (you may use command sudo vim /etc/nsswitch.conf). I’ve changed line:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns
to:
hosts: dns files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return]
and now it is working as expected!
I hope this helps anyone that comes accross the same problem.