socket.getfqdn() ignores changes to /etc/hosts

I thought that was the problem, anyway. I'd edited /etc/hosts, changing the fake fully-qualified domain name of my host. Yet, when I launched Python and tried to get the domain name, it still returned the value which had originally been in /etc/hosts:

>>> import socket
>>> socket.getfqdn()

Short answer: after making a change to /etc/hosts, don't forget to flush the lookup daemon's cache:

sudo lookupd -flushcache