Due to security considerations my web server is placed behind a packet filter, both linux boxes. The webserver has the internal ip address 10.0.0.171, the packet filter has to the internal side the ip address 10.0.0.170 and to the outside the official ip address which would have the web server itself in case of no packet filter in between. On the webserver are hosted the pages of three domains, all under the same ip address, as name based virtual hosts, say domain1, domain2 and domain3. For domain1 there are the appropriate entries in /etc/hosts. When I want to access the web server apache with domain1 locally, i.e. with wget, all works fine. But for domain2 and domain3, this does not work, wget runs in a timeout. This is quite clear, because DNS gives the official ip address, not the internal 10.0.0.171. I added domain1 and domain2 to /etc/hosts, but two hours later, the server hanged. Was it the wrong syntax in /etc/hosts? How this must be? Or is it not possible to list more then one FQDN in /etc/hosts? Should it be 10.0.0.171 domain1 domain2 domain3 each as FQDN? mfg ar -- mailto:andreas@rittershofer.de http://www.rittershofer.de PGP-Public-Key http://www.rittershofer.de/ari.htm