strange behaviour of firefox

[Joel Rees]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 6:42 AM, François Patte
<francois.patte at mi.parisdescartes.fr> wrote:
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> Le 08/08/2011 23:33, Veeti Paananen a écrit :
>> On 08/09/2011 12:23 AM, François Patte wrote:
>>> Bonsoir,
>>>
>>> I have been trying for many days to use swat with firefox, typing in
>>> the url form:
>>>
>>> http://localhost:901
>>>
>>> This failed because firefox try to open this url: www.localhost.com
>>
>> This is just a guess, but perhaps your /etc/hosts file is missing
>> something like this:
>>
>> 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost (your hostname)
>
> No! My /etc/hosts is (this is the file written by fedora installer):

The fedora installer has no way of knowing what domain name you want
to pretend your box will be seen to the web by, so the one written by
the installer is going to be missing the information you need to
connect.

> 127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4
> localhost4.localdomain4
> ::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6
> localhost6.localdomain6

As you see. No mention of the domain name you expect your computer to
have been automatically assigned.

Simply put, the host name you told the installer has nothing to do
with the domain names visible on the web. You have to get the right to
use a name on the web, and you have to tell the rest of the web that
you want the machine to be known by that name.

Maybe you don't want to do that, or can't. In fact, you probably
don't, just yet. In that case, you can use the hosts file to tell you
machine what it should see itself as on the web, without telling the
rest of the web.

Or you can set up a DNS server on your local LAN, but I'm guessing you
don't want to go that far yet.

You might want to start with <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_name>
and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file>, then maybe look at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_dns>.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name> is available in a lot of
languages if you have a language that works better for you than
English or the other major languages. Check the list of languages on
the left.

At some point, the reason the behavior you observe is not particularly
strange after all should become apparent, as will the way to get the
behavior you want.

Joel Rees