Release found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Problem

The system-config-network tool crashes when there are invalid entries in the /etc/hosts/ file.

Solution

The system-config-network tool in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 does not validate the Host entries in /etc/hosts. Due to this known bug, you may experience a crash in system-config-network when an entry in /etc/hosts is incorrect. This is a known bug (# 492915) in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and will be fixed in a future release. 

A correct entry in /etc/hosts takes the following form:

IP_address canonical_hostname [aliases...]

The IP_address and canonical_hostname are required entries. You may have zero or more aliases for each entry. Hence, the following entries can be considered valid:

192.168.1.1 my-test
192.168.1.2 joe-test joe-rhel5

However, an entry containing only the IP address is considered invalid. Such an entry will cause a crash in system-config-network with the following backtrace:

Component: system-config-network 
Version: 1.3.99.12 
Summary: TB0a0f70ae maindialog.py:602:hydrateProfiles:TypeError: sequence item not a string or unicode object 
 
Traceback (most recent call last): 
  File "/usr/sbin/system-config-network-gui", line 167, in main 
    window = mainDialog() 
  File "/usr/share/system-config-network/netconfpkg/gui/maindialog.py", line 248, in __init__ 
    self.hydrate() 
  File "/usr/share/system-config-network/netconfpkg/gui/maindialog.py", line 392, in hydrate 
    self.hydrateProfiles() 
  File "/usr/share/system-config-network/netconfpkg/gui/maindialog.py", line 602, in hydrateProfiles 
    hclist.append([host.IP, host.Hostname, 
TypeError: sequence item not a string or unicode object

You may work around this crash by correcting (or commenting out) the invalid entries in /etc/hosts.