why I can not ping the specific host name in /etc/hosts under Mac OS Yosemite 10.10.1?

Question

I add a subdomain into file /etc/hosts:

0.0.0.0 localhost.lan group1.localhost.lan group2.localhost.lan

and then in the terminal:

ping localhost.lan 

I got the error msg:

ping: sendto: No route to host
ping: sendto: No route to host
Request timeout for icmp_seq 0

But in my another machine with Fedora Linux 20 , it can work well! I don't know what software I install in my linux let ping to work, or Mac OS has other rules?

Any advice will be welcome!

Answer 1

On Mac OS X, 0.0.0.0 does not point at localhost as on Linux. If you point it at 127.0.0.1 or ::1 , it will work.

Answer 2

As far as I know 0.0.0.0/8 is a reserved address space that's used to broadcast messages to the current network. According to RFC 1700 it can only be used as a source address, not as a destination.