Eclipse debug problem

Yesterday I had some strange debug problem in Eclipse on OSX. Whenever I tried to start a debug session I got the following error screen

Accompanying this error dialog were the following lines in the Eclipse Console view

Error [22] in gethostbyname() call!
err:: Invalid argument
Socket transport failed to init.
Transport dt_socket failed to initialize, rc = -1.
FATAL ERROR in native method: No transports initialized

After some Googling it seems that the cause is an incorrect network configuration. Since I recently had changed something in my hosts file, that was the first place I was going to look, certainly after trying to do ping localhost and not getting a response back.

A quick examination of my /etc/hosts file and adding the line

127.0.0.1 localhost

solved my debugging problems.