Re: Proposed new scheme for resolving the system hostname

[Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>]

Previously Thomas Hood wrote:
> First of all, the system hostname should always be its own canonical
> hostname in the sense of hosts(5), unless the system has a static
> domain name, in which case the canonical hostname should be the FQDN
> formed from the system hostname and the domain name.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. If you mean the system should
always use a fixed hostname I disagree; for a lot of environments you
want to set the hostname via DHCP.

> Accordingly, the canonical host name of the system should never be
> 'localhost.localdomain'; accordingly the system hostname should never
> resolve to IP address 127.0.0.1 whose canonical host name is and will
> remain 'localhost.localdomain'.

Again I do not agree. For a standalone workstation with no network
connectivity (and perhaps even without any network device) attaching the
hostname to 127.0.0.1 should be fine.

> The system hostname should resolve either to the primary NIC's static
> IP address (if there is one) or to the address returned by DNS (if
> this is available) or to 127.0.1.1 (failing both of the above).

The concept of 'primary NIC' does not exist.

> A1. The installer writes an /etc/nsswitch.conf file that contains:
> 
>     hosts: files dns defaults

'defaults' is a highly confusing name

> A2. We create a new NSS module called "defaults" which simply resolves
> the local hostname to IP address 127.0.1.1 which has as its canonical
> hostname the system hostname.

That might confuse a lot of people.

Wichert.

-- 
Wichert Akkerman <wichert@wiggy.net>    It is simple to make things.
http://www.wiggy.net/                   It is hard to make things simple.