This has to do with DNS I believe. What DNS does is provide a way for host names (as "kohaOPAC.mylibrary.edu" for example) to be translated to IP addresses (as 123.124.125.126). This translation may be needed by either the workstation of the user trying to access the koha system, or the system itself when it tries to access various components (as the MySQL server for example).
If there is a namespace available (mylibrary.edu in our example), and provisions have been made for it to accommodate a koha installation (provision for the Fully Qualified Domain+Host names "kohaOPAC.mylibrary.edu" and "kohaADMIN.mylibrary.edu" for example), and the koha server has been configured accordingly, then no DNS host file tweaking is necessary. The "hosts" file was the pre-DNS way of associating host names with IP addresses, and is still used for compatibility reasons and those of exception handling. Looking-up the hosts file is faster and usually precedes making a query to one or more DNS servers. Therefore "tweaking the host file" means "add the necessary entries if needed, to a certain file named hosts, so that the host names that the installer person selected/entered previously during the installation procedures, do indeed point to a valid host, either as a result of a DNS query or a hosts file look-up". kind regards, Manos PETRIDIS NB: a hosts file may still be used nevertheless, even when DNS works fine, just to attain some slight performance increase when accessing specific hosts. It would be a poor practice however, as it could lead to difficult to trace problems when something needs to be changed in the configuration and no proper documentation exists/is consulted. -----Original Message----- From: koha-boun...@lists.katipo.co.nz [mailto:koha-boun...@lists.katipo.co.nz] On Behalf Of Richard Maileseni Sent: Monday, August 26, 2013 10:55 AM To: koha@lists.katipo.co.nz Subject: [Koha] (no subject) hi guys! Please can anyone explain the "Tweak Host File" step in http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Koha_on_ubuntu_-_packages thanks. _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha _______________________________________________ Koha mailing list http://koha-community.org Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha