Help ColdFusion not working in the sky!!!

Well this is a little troubleshooting at 10k in the air. Apparently today when I went to debug an app I am working on, while on my flight home, ColdFusion would continue to give me a 500 error. My first instinct was to open up my coldfusion-out.log file and see if I could find the culprit. As I began to look thru the entries I noticed the License service would fail to start. The line that told me this was the following:

Unable to initialise License service: coldfusion.server.ServiceException: host9772188245.direcpc.com: host9772188245.direcpc.com: nodename nor servname provided, or not known.

So I decided to do a quick Google search and found the following post.

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-server-starting-with-unable-to-initialise-service-exception

Now I am on a Mac and that post was for Red Hat but what I did notice is that they talk about the hostname, then it clicked, I've read this somewhere before, where ColdFusion would fail if the service could not access the License server by hostname.

So I opened up my terminal and typed hostname and was returned with  host9772188245.direcpc.com which was weird because I know my hostname is suppose to be Giancarlos-MacBook-Pro.local. Now I've flown in other flights with WiFi an never had this issue so I decided to do a quick test. I disconnected from my WiFi connection on my SouthWest flight and typed hostname and like magic back to normal. Apparently, this service overwrites your hostname when you connect, in turn causing ColdFusion to fail startup if done after WiFi connection.

The quick fix was to open up my hosts file and type the following:

127.0.0.12 host9772188245.direcpc.com

After that I restarted ColdFusion and I was back on track!!! So if your ColdFusion Server fails to start while you are up in the sky, remember, check your hostname and make sure you can ping it. If not then ColdFusion will fail to start.

Hopefully this helps someone who runs into this issue as well. Hair pulling incident averted!