newbie needs help building Python 2.5 for Fedora Core 6

[bobmon]

WOW.  I'm gobsmacked...

On Feb 24, 6:13 pm, Tony Nelson
<*firstname*nlsnews at georgea*lastname*.com> wrote:
>
> Try it from the python command line.  This is what happens when I try it


Okay, that was interesting...

Apparently there's a subtlety of /etc/hosts that affects this!
Originally it had this line:
    127.0.0.1    localhost    localhost.localdomain    foobar
and I get this result for my machine ("foobar.foodomain.com"):
    >>>
    >>> import socket
    >>> socket.gethostname()
    'foobar.foodomain.com'
    >>> socket.gethostbyname(_)
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    socket.gaierror: (-2, 'Name or service not known')
    >>>
    >>>
    >>> socket.gethostbyname('localhost')
    '127.0.0.1'
    >>> socket.gethostbyname('localhost.localdomain')
    '127.0.0.1'
    >>>

Whe I change /etc/hosts to this:
    127.0.0.1    foobar    foobar.foodomain.net
localhost.localdomain   localhost
Python is happy and I get;
    >>>
    >>> import socket
    >>> socket.gethostname()
    'foobar.foodomain.net'
    >>> socket.gethostbyname(_)
    '127.0.0.1'
    >>>


So, problem "fixed" although I have no real understanding of what was
wrong or what's right now.
Only that "gethostbyname()" seems to be really sensitive to the format
of the /etc/hosts file.

Thank you, Tony Nelson.
-Bob Montante, -bob,mon.