localhost woes -- help requested

[Rodney W. Grimes]

> In message <CA+tpaK1NKqctQqZeRg+emM8gVKWuJeveCVVx-FHsVbrkYD9Y2Q at mail.gmail.com>, 
> Adam <amvandemore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 12:54 AM Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com>
> >wrote:
> >> ... except for the browsers, and also one other thing (nmh outbound
> >> email handling).  Now, both Firefox and Opera crash and burn, right
> >> out of the gate, when started from the command line.  In both cases
> >> thet do so both with entirely cryptic failure messages.
> >>
> >> But here's the kicker... I futzed around with this awhile and found
> >> out that if I just change the default value of the DISPLAY environment
> >> variable from "localhost:0.0" to ":0.0" then both browsers *do* then
> >> start up successfully from the command line.
> >>
> >> So, um, what the bleep did I do wrong?
> >>
> >> Here's the output of the command "getent hosts localhost":
> >>
> >> ::1               localhost
> >> 127.0.0.1         localhost  localhost.tristatelogic.com
> >>
> >>
> >> Any hints for how I can debug this mess would be appreciated.
> >>
> >
> >Do you have local_unbound running?  It's probably caching the result.
> >
> >/etc/rc.d/local_unbound stop
> >
> >Then try your changes to /etc/hosts
> 
> I have now rebooted the system multiple times, from a cold start, and
> this has had *no* effect on the output generated by "getent hosts localhost".
> 
> That is *still* showing me that there exists a mapping from "localhost"
> to an IPv6 address, even though I commented that out in my /etc/hosts
> file.
> 
> I really would like to understand why manual edits to /etc/hosts seem
> to have no effect whatosoever.  And more importantly, I'd really still
> like to know whey X applications cannot seem to connect to the X server
> when and if DISPLAY is set to localhost:0.0 while they have no problem
> doing so when DISPLAY is instead set to :0.0

What is in /etc/host.conf, /etc/resolv.conf, do you have DNS running?

-- 
Rod Grimes                                                 rgrimes at freebsd.org