As Corion says, it sounds like a caching issue. On SLES, it is likely you have an nscd daemon running, which is responsible for caching this data. According to the documentation, running this command after changing /etc/hosts will invalidate the cache and should resolve your problem, I think:

sudo nscd -i /etc/hosts

In reply to Re: /etc/hosts is not evaluated after modification on Linux by philipbailey
in thread /etc/hosts is not evaluated after modification on Linux by Anonymous Monk

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