[Linux] What if /etc/hosts edits do not work as expected?

Today, I encountered a problem when the edits I made to ‘/etc/hosts’ file on a Linux box didn’t work as expected.

In the /etc/hosts file I added the following line,

192.168.50.2 shaakunthala.com

And to test, issued the following command,

$ ping shaakunthala.com

And the result was,

PING shaakunthala.com (184.168.221.17) 56(84) bytes of data.

That’s not the IP address I wanted to temporarily set it to. So I looked up the Internet and various sources gave me the following firsthand solution.

# /etc/init.d/nscd restart

Restart the name service cache daemon. Similar to the ‘ipconfig/flushdns’ thing you would do on a Windows box.

And it worked!