Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?
On Dec 29, 2009, at 8:46, Vincent Bernat wrote:
> OoO En ce doux début de matinée du mardi 29 décembre 2009, vers 08:34,
> je disais:
>
>>> 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?
>
>> A common way to get hostname is to request node name through uname, then
>> asks for a resolution of this name. If the name does not appear in
>> /etc/hosts, this will lead to a DNS resolution and without network, this
>> can take a long time.
>
> And BTW, this is exactly what hostname -f does. It does not read /etc/hostname.
On one of my machines apticron uses a call to hostname -f, which fails, while uname -n succeeds.
Perhaps it should be a bug to use hostname -f since it unreliable?
Jeremiah
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