Hosts entry not working on macbook pro

Hello

I made an entry under /private/etc/hosts file to have a static mapping of IP to hostname..but it doesn't seem to work.


eg:

# sudo nano /private/etc/hosts

# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
10.21.9.3 Google




Every time i reach out Google it does name look up and goes out to internet.

Any idea?
i cleared cache using 'dscacheutil -flushcache' .. no luck.

Thanks all!

Moved to appropriate forum.

Well, my first question would be... "What are you trying to accomplish?"

You might try putting the entry in the format:

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx hostname alias

and make sure you have an alias. Sometimes OS X gets freaked out without one.

Then try: lookupd -flushcache

I'll do some looking around if that doesn't work. It's been awhile since I messed with OS X hosts files.

Here's a useful snippet I found...

http://decoding.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-in-mac-os-x-leopard/

"Also keep in mind, you can completely stop using /etc/hosts and use dscl to manage your hosts, which seems to be how Apple is moving forward in this regard. `man dscl` for more info.

To add a host with dscl, and skip /etc/hosts the syntax is pretty easy. This would create foobar.local and point it to 127.0.0.1

sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/foobar.local IPAddress 127.0.0.1

You can then flush the cache to have it take effect:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

And in case you were wondering what is in that cache, just to make sure it was cleared, or if you are having trouble, you can list the cache:

sudo dscacheutil -cachedump -entries Host

You can delete much the same:

sudo dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Hosts/foobar.local

And of course, if you want to list your entries:

dscl localhost -list /Local/Default/Hosts"

Excellent!!

Thank you very much XJ-Linux!!

"sudo dscl localhost -create /Local/Default/Hosts/foobar.local IPAddress 127.0.0.1" worked perfect.

What ever i do on /etc/hosts doesn't seem to change a thing for some reason.

Cheers

Good deal. It was an old link I had in my browser and I couldn't remember why I had it saved. Now I remember it had to do with getting to where I wanted within a clients firewall/router/etc. Glad it worked for you!