Comment 8 for bug 993298

Contributors have claimed here (bug #993298) above that /etc/hosts is no longer respected, but that is not the case. As always, with

    hosts: files [...]

in /etc/nsswitch.conf, the libc resolver consults /etc/hosts first.

Yes, NM runs dnsmasq with the no-hosts option. Consequently a DNS lookup on 127.0.0.1 does not respect /etc/hosts. But prior to Ubuntu 12.04, NM didn't start a local nameserver at all; no DNS lookups were done externally and /etc/hosts wasn't respected then either.

The contributors who say that /etc/hosts is "no longer" consulted must (I conclude) have been running the standalone server version of dnsmasq before. That dnsmasq respects /etc/hosts and listens at 127.0.0.1 by default. Now, because of bug #959037 it is not possible in Ubuntu 12.04 to run standalone dnsmasq alongside nm-dnsmasq. But it *is* possible to run standalone dnsmasq if nm-dnsmasq is disabled (by commenting out "dns=dnsmasq" in /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf and restarting network-manager) and that should restore the old situation.

Assuming that the underlying wish is that standalone dnsmasq can be run without the need to comment out "dns=dnsmasq", I propose to merge this report with #959037 which discusses ways of realizing this. See, for example, comment #88 in that bug report.