Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?
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".
Anything mail related must use /etc/mailname if it needs something that
can be translated to an IP address.
> Your solution to #562780 is broken anyway, /etc/hostname can (and
> actually should) be a FQDN.
No. /etc/hostname has _nothing_ to do with networking. People
historically was lazy to do the proper interface/address enumeration(*)
and instead pretended that /etc/hostname is something resolvable, but it
is simply not true. It may be made to work in some really simple
configurations (read: the host has just a single static IP address), but
it cannot work in any serious server configuration having multiple
interfaces and every interface having multiple addresses.
Anything that uses "fqdn -f" today should really do the following:
L := empty list
loop I for all configured interfaces
loop P for all supported network protocols
loop A for all addresses on I of protocol P
append getnameinfo(A) to L
remove duplicates from L
Gabor
(*) mostly because doing this enumeration in a portable way is a PITA
--
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MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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