There are several reasons you may want to change the hostname lookup order. Some people use the equivalent of the /etc/hosts file to thwart name lookups for offensive ad-serving machines on the Internet. Others of us just want to refer to a machine (usually a client's machine with a long fully-qualified domain name) with some shorthand.

This page describes that process. Rather than describing what you're doing, I'll show you exactly what to do.

I assure you that the UNIX commands I'll direct you to invoke have been taken directly from a Terminal window - these are the commands I just used to do a clean install - rather than having been composed after the fact. This is *exactly* what worked for me. I've taken pains to choose forms of the commands which should make sense to you even if you're new to UNIX.

You may use the command lookupd -configuration to see the current state of the lookup daemon. If the LookupOrder isn't as you like it, here's the process for changing it. (I want to have FF - flat files - used before Mac OS X looks elsewhere for hostname information.)

Specifying the lookup order in /etc/lookupd/hosts

% ls /etc/lookupd/hosts ls: /etc/lookupd/hosts: No such file or directory % mkdir -p /etc/lookupd % sudo vi /etc/lookupd/hosts insert LookupOrder Cache FF NI DNS DS and save %

Restart the lookup daemon

Instead of rebooting the computer you can manually restart the lookup daemon like this:

% sudo kill -HUP `cat /var/run/lookupd.pid`

Backup, create, and load hostnames

% cd ~ % nidump -r /machines / > machines.original % vi myHostnames add files of the format 10.1.2.3 hostname and save % sudo niload -v hosts / < myHostnames

Tweaking the hostnames