After installing my mod_security module for apache, I could not restart my apache server. I kept getting the following error:

[alert] (EAI 2)Name or service not known: mod_unique_id: unable to find IPv4 address of "mn-ws"

In this case, mn-ws was the host name of my computer.

This is a pretty simple fix, but I’ll document it anyway. The issue was that my host name was not looking up to my server.

First, I executed the hostname command. This reported back ‘mn-ws’ properly. Then, I tried to ping mn-ws with no reply. I finally put an entry in the /etc/hosts file with the following content:

127.0.0.1 mn-ws

This solved the issue and mod_security would now allow the server to start. Pretty simple.