Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?

["John H. Robinson, IV" <jaqque@debian.org>]

Brian May wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 03:52:44AM +0100, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > Considering that any non-trivial server needs to send email out, having
> > a working FQDN configured is not "obsolete".
> 
> I believe mail servers these days generally use /etc/mailname, not hostname -f
> (although hostname -f might be the default for /etc/mailname).
> 
> I consider using hostname -f for anything other then the initial default value
> broken because computers can have multiple network cards, multiple IP
> addresses, multiple domains, etc. I generally like to assume my computer isn't
> going to break badly because I have to change the output hostname -f returns.

This is one place where Solaris has gotten this right: /etc/nodename
refers to the system itself, while each interface has its own (cf:
/etc/hostname.hme0).

-- 
John H. Robinson, IV          jaqque@debian.org
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