On Mar 8, 2013 5:27 AM, "Alan McKinnon" <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Anyone know if there's a way to get /etc/hosts to support the notion of > an include file? I did my homework and found nothing, maybe someone else > knows more. > > I really do need this, I have an app that discovers things on the > network and knows their address. This makes it's automated way into DNS > but takes a few days, and another app needs to use the fqdn right now. > So /etc/hosts is the way to go for the interim three days. > > I've worked around it by creating /etc/hosts.d/ containing a header and > a data file. cat the two and redirect to /etc/hosts.d/hosts and the real > hosts file is a symlink to that. It's a sub-directory as none of these > apps run as root and only root can modiy the real hosts file. > > This works well enough, but a supported include mechanism would make > life so much simpler, not to mention easier for my colleagues to > understand what the blazes I set up :-) > > > > -- > Alan McKinnon > alan.mckin...@gmail.com > > >
An option would be to create a cron job which generates the hosts file every minute. The cron job should also insert a header on top of the hosts file telling: + this file (hosts) is dynamically generated + by a system cron job + the cron job's script location Besides, you said you're going to need this workaround only for a couple of days, so installing Samba4 might be an overkill. Rgds, --
