How network manager is resolving localhost without /etc/hosts

[Liam Proven]

On 20 December 2015 at 21:57, Shashwat Kumar <shashwatkmr.001 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I tried to make a new mapping in /etc/hosts which didn't work. After
> searching I found that network-manager does not use /etc/hosts but dnsmasq
> is used as local dns resolver.
>
> To confirm this design, I commented every line in /etc/hosts and flush
> dnsmasq cache using
>
> sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart
>
> and restarted network-manager
>
> sudo service network-manager restart
>
> But to my surprise ping localhost was still resolving to 127.0.0.1. As per
> my knowledge localhost mapping is only maintained in /etc/hosts. So how
> localhost was still being resolved? Is there any information that I am
> missing?
>
> Thanks in advance.


Localhost is *always* 127.0.0.1 on any computer with IPv4. You can't
change this to anything else in any way at all, as far as I know; it's
part of the definition of IPv4.

You do *not* set localhost to your network IP address! That will break
TCP/IP very badly, I think.

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