Force ssl/ssh to use the hosts file

Linux and Unix-Like Red Hat
1

does anyone know how to force ssh/ssl to use the hosts file instead of DNS? I have disabled the DNS servers but ssh still will not resolve a host in the hosts file.

thanks in advance for the help!

DS

2

Not sure what OS you're using, but if available, you could set the nsswitch.conf file to default to files (meaning /etc/hosts) and then dns:

Comment out these lines if they exists:
hosts:          dns files
hosts:          files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4

And replace with this line:
hosts:          files dns
3

RHEL 6.5

nsswitch is set to files dns

it will eventually resolve to the hosts file, but it takes about a minute to do so.

thanks!
DS

4

Inside

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tags, an you paste the contents of /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/resolv.conf so we can look at all the settings. It sounds to me like you are still going DNS first and there is a problem on the DNS servers. I assume that the name you are using is not in DNS, but the DNS should recognise it and return a "not found" sort of response much faster.

Do you have multiple DNS servers and is one broken? Can you do the following to each configured DNS server IP:-

nslookup known.good.name dns.server.ip.address

Do you get a response in a suitable time? It is possible that you need to adjust your time-out values for your DNS query. There are different ways of implementing the TIMEOUT and RETRY values so you get a sensible response.

Regards,
Robin