This week I once again ran into a problem I've encountered before: issues caused by the default values in /etc/hosts used in several Linux distributions, including older versions of Debian and Ubuntu. It seems to have been fixed in Debian Lenny, but I've encountered it on at least one recently installed machine, so other applications may be overwriting the file incorrectly.

The problematic localhost line in /etc/hosts looks like this:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

Unfortunately, this setup confuses some applications. I've seen this cause problems with kpropd and other Kerberos apps...

Read the rest of this excellent Debian tip at Serverwatch.com