I am using ubuntu 7.4 and su, sudo, and su - are giving me the same responds. unable to lookup jordan via gethostbyname() I was clearly not thinking right because it did not make a back up. Although I have tried to scp the host file from my notebook to the desktop and i get permission denied. <div>On 7/3/07, Stephan Andre' <<a href="mailto:andres@msu.edu">andres@msu.edu</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On Tuesday 03 July 2007 13:39:13 Jordan Robison wrote: > I was messing with the hosts file and changed something around and I spent > the rest of the night trying to fix it. Here is the problem that happens > every time I use sudo: > sudo: unable to lookup jordan via gethostbyname() > > I am not able to do anything under Su and from what it looks like is that I > might have to reformat unless you geniuses out there know of any better way > of  helping me fix this problem. You give no indication as to what operating system you're using, but if you have single-user mode, you ought to be able to boot up into that, and then fix the hosts file. This is also a good time to develop a system of saving and storing critical data files, such that if they get munged they can be restored quickly.  My /etc (OpenBSD) is about 8M in size, so its easy for me to make a tarball of that dir frequently.  Add /var/log, /var/www and perhaps a few others and you have the core of a configuration backup. --STeve Andre' _______________________________________________ linux-user mailing list <a href="mailto:linux-user@egr.msu.edu">linux-user@egr.msu.edu</a> <a href="http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user">http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user</a> </blockquote></div> -- Jordan Robison