Re: odd psql behaviour on OSX

Robert J. Sanford, Jr. sez:
} i am running postgresql 7.2 for OSX (10.1.4?) that was pre-built by marc
} liyange (thank you very much mr. liyange!). whenever i'm working on my local
} machine everything works gloriously. but when i attempt to use psql to
} attach to a remote host i always receive the error message of "unknown
} host".
}
} i will type in a command line of
} $psql -h 192.168.1.128 -U myName myDBName
}
} and get back
} psql: unknown host:192.168.1.128
}
} that server responds when i ping it. i have tried adding entries into my
} hosts file and restarting the system but that didn't help either. i have
} tried the -p 4532 option to specify the port but that doesn't work either.

Incidentally, MacOS X normally ignores the /etc/hosts file. If you want to
set up that sort of thing, you need to do it in NetInfo Manager.app (or
with niutil) to add an entry to /machines.

} when i use dbvisualizer with the postgresql jdbc driver i can connect with
} no problems. when i try psql on a win2k machine using cygin i can connect
} with no problems. this leads me to believe that there is an issue with psql
} accessing the network on osx.
}
} any ideas and/or suggestions?

I am using the same package and version without any such difficulties. I
suspect that it is a DNS issue. See if it has the same problem if you add a
period to the end of the host. This will make the DNS lookup behave a bit
differently (I forget exactly what it shortcuts... maybe just expanding
with search domains, maybe all lookups altogether on a numeric address).
Thus:

psql -h 192.168.1.128. -U myName myDBName

} rjsjr
--Greg