Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?
On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:03:12 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2009-12-28 23:41:38 +0000, Sam Morris wrote:
>> Details in <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316099>. I
>> do wonder, however, why the system hostname has to appear in /etc/hosts
>> at all? Programs that want to find it out can read /etc/hostname
>> directly, after all. And wtf is 'localdomain' for, anyway?
>
> Programs may need the FQDN, even without any network connection (for
> instance, even local mail messages should have a Message-Id). And
> /etc/hostname doesn't necessarily contain the FQDN.
Hm, but shouldn't they use another method to get it? My laptop has no
FQDN when it is not connected to a network, and even when it is, it has
never, to my knowledge, had a fully qualified name that could be resolved
to find out its network address.
Conversely, I have used servers that had multiple network interfaces,
some of which even have multiple network addresses assigned to them.
'hostname -f' did not yield a sensible result on a couple of these
systems.
What would a hypothetical host that only had IPv6 connectivity do? We
certainly don't have a line analogous to the '127.0.1.1' hack in /etc/
hosts for ipv6, and I'm not even sure what such a line would look like,
since ::1 has a /128 netmask.
As for mail, we already appear to have an /etc/mailname file for MTAs and
MUAs to use for finding out the 'canonical' name of the host for message-
IDs and the like.
> Also, it is required that the FQDN be resolvable (but I wonder whether
> this is useful in practice).
--
Sam Morris
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