583486 - /etc/hosts is ignored when http proxy is specified

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[TT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B405 Safari/531.21.10
Build Identifier: 

I'm behind a corporate firewall/proxy that provides DNS services for Seamonkey.  I'm no expert on this, but it appears that Seamonkey queries the proxy server for DNS lookups.  I suspect this because the 'host' and 'nslookup' commands don't work on external hostnames.

My problem is that for one particular external host, I want Seamonkey to use a different IP address than what the proxy DNS server returns.  So i put that IP address and host in my /etc/hosts file. I want Seamonkey to use that IP address when it resolves the hostnames, but then I want Seamonkey to request that IP address through the proxy.

It appears that this doesn't work.  Seamonkey ignores the entry in /etc/hosts.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

Gecko never reads /etc/hosts, it just uses the systems getbyhostname() function for DNS resolutions. The OS reads /etc/hosts and is doing a query to the remote DNS server.
Gecko doesn't do a local DNS resolution if it uses a http proxy. That doesn't make sense in most cases.

In your case you can't do local DNS resolution because it wouldn't work for external hosts.

Your case is very special and I think you should better do that in an extension.

Comment 2

[TT]

What kind of extension would help me out?

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I mean that this functionality doesn't exists and that this is a very unusual edge case. Someone have to write an extension to do this because I don't think that this is something that we should implement in Gecko.

Comment 4

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

I will mark this invalid.
It's by design that the proxy does all the DNS lookups if you configure one.

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

and I forgot: it should work if you add that hostname on the no proxy list.