Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?
Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.org> writes:
> On 2009-12-29 20:23:31 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> No, it's not. You have completely misunderstood the purpose of
>> /etc/mailname.
> No, this is what is documented. You should RTFM.
Er, yes, I have, several times. It's something that one does when one is
maintaining the manual in question.
>> If your package needs to know what hostname to use on (for example)
>> outgoing news and mail messages which are generated locally, you
>> should use the file /etc/mailname. It will contain the portion after
>> the username and @ (at) sign for email addresses of users on the
>> machine (followed by a newline).
>>
>> So on my system, for instance, /etc/mailname is "stanford.edu,"
>> because that's what goes on the RHS of e-mail addresses. Which, of
>> course, is not the canonical name of my laptop.
> "stanford.edu" is definitely wrong. First it's just a domain name, not a
> FQDN (as required by the mailname(5) man page).
stanford.edu is an RFC 1035 FQDN. I've watched N different iterations of
the discussion of exactly what is an FQDN in various IETF lists, and while
there are some strange corner cases, ("va", for instance), stanford.edu
isn't one of them. You'll observe that the grammar in RFC 1035 matches it
just fine, and all of the requirements stated for it in RFC 1035 are met.
> This would meen that two different machines could generate the same
> Message-Id; the right part of "@" in a Message-Id should contain the
> hostname to avoid this kind of problems.
The term "message ID" appears nowhere in the description of /etc/mailname.
Why do you think it's supposed to be used for generating message IDs? It
is specifically intended for generating e-mail addresses.
> Moreover, concerning the e-mail addresses, root is local to the machine,
> so that generating a mail from root@stanford.edu is incorrect.
You do not know either that root is local to my system or that
root@stanford.edu is incorrect for it. Both of those are configuration
*choices*, not requirements.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: