GetLocalHost throws UnknownHostException

Question

We have a situation where #getLocalHost will intermittently throw an UnknownHostException. I've checked etc/hosts and everything is normal, additionally, the machine is not using DNS.
The exception is a little odd in that the local host name is listed twice:
Caused by: java.net.UnknownHostException: myhost: myhost
      at java.net.InetAddress.getLocalHost(InetAddress.java:1191)If I look at the source, it seems that the actual exception is being thrown from #getAddressFromNameService on this line:
          byte_array = nameService.lookupAllHostAddr(host);Anyone run into this? What's odd is that it is intermittent, not predictable.
R.

Answer 1

Everyone gets annoyed at this one (especially when developing on a laptop). Here's a snippet of code I often use when testing code locally
    * Best attempt to get the local hostname, with or without the existence of a DNS entry.
    * @author [email protected]
    * @return Short version of the local hostname.
    * @throws UnknownHostException There is a problem with the DNS entry for this host and/or this JVM implementation
    * does not return the standard error string.
   public static String getLocalHostName() throws UnknownHostException {
      try {
           return (InetAddress.getLocalHost()).getHostName();
      } catch ( UnknownHostException uhe ) {
          String host = uhe.getMessage(); // host = "hostname: hostname"
          if ( host!=null ) {
              int colon = host.indexOf(':');
              if ( colon>0 ) {
                 return host.substring(0, colon); // Dangerous, this is JVM dependant code.
          throw uhe;
   }