Yosemite, Pulse and /etc/hosts file

[stuarteberg]

While I was logged in to a VPN using Pulse Secure, I decided to make some edits to my /etc/hosts file.  (The edits were unrelated to the Pulse secure address.)  When I disconnected from Pulse, it overwrote the ENTIRE /etc/hosts file, discarding my changes.  This is very easy to preproduce.

The app should not overwrite the entire file.  It should re-read /etc/hosts and then modify ONLY the text that the app itself inserted, i.e. between the BEGIN/END tags that the app inserted.

FWIW, I'm using Pulse Secure 5.2.5 (897), on MacOS 10.12.6

[zanyterp]

That is an expected behavior at this time. I would recommend working with your account team to let the product team know that this is inefficient for your needs and causes problems.
when the VPN is up, changes should be made to both /etc/hosts & /etc/pulse-hosts.bak

[r@yElr3y]

As @zanyterp mentioned, Pulse Client will restore the hosts.bak (backup file; took before VPN connection) with the original one which will cause custom modified data to be overwritten.

[conartist6]

If nothing else, may I recommend an extremely simple fix? Currently the following section is added to the file:

# BEGIN hosts added by Pulse
132.188.0.254   secure.mycompany.com
# END hosts added by Pulse

Just add one more line:

# WARNING: Any changes made to this file while Pulse is connected will be reverted

Of course, if you think that reading that will discourage users of your product, you might just want to fix the bug : )