Cygwin Bad Address

Question

When I open a cygwin console I get the following message:

hostname: : Bad address

Furthermore when I try to ssh into a server I get this message:

gethostname: Bad address

Does anyone know what this might be about? I tried reinstalling ssh and reinstalling cygwin to no avail.

Answer 1

The only way I could fix this was by installing the 32bit version of Cygwin, it's worked perfectly on my 64bit system.

Answer 2

I believe this is a known problem affecting some 64-bit users with the latest version of Cygwin (1.7.29-2).

See the thread here: http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2014-04/msg00132.html

I believe the only solution at this point is to download a recent snapshot, which has a patch for this.

You can get snapshots here: http://cygwin.com/snapshots

But read the directions first here: http://cygwin.com/faq.html#faq.setup.snapshots

Answer 3

Chris's method worked. I'm just going to put it in my words here.

This happened to me with Cygwin 64bit. I unplugged my laptop and at some point it crashed and restarted, it had a network issue wlan. I'm not sure the cause but suddenly I got that message "hostname: : Bad address" when going into cygwin. cygwin.bat runs .\bin\bash --login i and then I got that message

Judging by the solution that worked (replacing cygwin1.dll)

My guess is cygwin1.dll got corrupted, perhaps from an unexpected shutdown (as I just had one of those and was fine before).

Solution was, to replace cygwin1.dll with the latest one from the cygwin snapshots link.

I went here

https://cygwin.com/snapshots/

Got the latest cygwin1.dll by clicking this link

Downloading cygwin1....dll.xz

http://cygwin.com/snapshots/x86_64/cygwin1-20141120.dll.xz

Extracting cygwin1.dll from it with 7zip (though some may use tar within cygwin but I closed cygwin particularly as i'll be replacing that file of cygwins)

made a copy of my existing cygwin1.dll and Copied cygwin1.dll over my existing cygwin1.dll

(I dragged the cygwin1.dll icon onto the command prompt to get the path to expand)

C:\cygwin\bin>move cygwin1.dll cygwinold1.dll
        1 file(s) moved.

C:\cygwin\bin>move C:\Users\harvey\Downloads\cygwin1-20141120.dll\cygwin1.dll .
        1 file(s) moved.

Then cygwin started fine no problems.