/etc/hosts - the gift that keeps on giving

/etc/hosts

The gift that keeps on giving, when you're paid on an hourly rate to do tech support. It is like the regexps of DNS: "I know, I'll modify /etc/hosts" ... now you have two problems.

• You modify /etc/hosts because you want to override the global DNS view of name N.
• Things works!
• Because things work, you don't undo your change in /etc/hosts. After all, things work.
• A year passes.
• You forget that you made the change.
• Suddenly on your machine only, but no one else's, you can't access the website at N any more.
• Hours of debugging!

Why modify /etc/hosts? Testing a new version of a site under real name (only on your own machines though), or because DNS is broken and you don't know why, or because you didn't plan your DNS change so now the caches are not updating fast enough and you are impatient.

/etc/hosts doesn't have an "eventual consistency" mehanism in place - DNS caches eventually expire and at least give vaguely consistent behaviour across the whole internet over a long enough period of time. /etc/hosts will never converge.