RE: Slow Ping using Host Table

> Why would you ever want to set it to *local?  Wouldn't it be better to
> add an entry for the machine you want in the enterprise's DNS servers
> rather than maintain a HOSTS table on every machine?

I completely agree with you. The HOSTS table should only be used for
'loopback' and 'localhost.' If you have more than 3 computers in a
network, DNS will save you a lot of maintenance ugliness.

However, I still think that *LOCAL makes more sense than *REMOTE!  *LOCAL
doesn't prevent you from using DNS, it just says that you don't want to
wait for DNS to time-out before checking HOSTS.

If nothing else, you'll want your loopback interface defined in the hosts
table. Surely you don't advocate having a several second delay for
connecting from one job to another on the same system? Or, worse, going
out across the network to connect to the same system?