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/etc/hosts is used to maintain common names for some services that have elastic IP's, such as the LDAP directories. This is necessary principally because of peculiarities of certificate validation in various pieces of software. This file
/etc/hosts is managed and propagated by Saltby Salt, but not through normal Salt mechanisms such as highstate. Instead, a control script located in root's home directory on the Salt Master is used to write the hosts file to various hosts through Salt. Whenever /etc/hosts needs to be changed or a new host dependent on /etc/hosts is added, this script must be run again.