the terminating period is actually the RFC standard for fully specifing a
domain name. the trailing dot is mandatory in DNS records. if the dot is
not there, the the default domain is appended to get the full name.

david

At 04:17 PM 1/13/02 -0800, you wrote:
>Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu> is widely believed to have written:
>
>> Does anyone know how to persuade a Mac (OS9) to accept foo.bar as
>> 127.0.0.1 - like adding a line to the hosts file on unix? My TCPIP
>> control panel has a button to open a dialogue to choose ahosts file, but
>> it doesn't appear to accept a text file in unix-like format.
>> 
>> Anybody ever got this to work?
>Finally got an answer to this. The Mac Hosts file is not _quite_ like a
>unix one (of course)
>
>{domain.name.} A {IP}
>
>works. Note the terminating . on the domainname and the 'A'. No idea
>why....
>
>tim
>-- 
>Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
>Years of development: We finally got one to work.
>
>
>
--
David Farber
dfarber at numenor.com