Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, 29 Dec 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> In truth, my laptop *does not have an FQDN*. The concept has no useful
> It must have, POSIX provided a way for apps to query it, and apps
> started doing that. So you need one. It will be an arbitrary one, but
> that's fine.
The fact that my laptop is working just fine, running Debian unstable,
without having any such thing seems to point out a conflict between your
statement and reality.
> Well, sorry, but since gethostname() and friends exist and are used,
> there IS a special name which is the box main 'identity'. That one
> needs to be there, needs to be sane, and most apps that use it will
> require it to resolve to something that works (that's what the loopback
> is for).
gethostname() for my laptop returns a string which is neither
fully-qualified nor resolves to anything in either DNS or /etc/hosts.
Which apps break exactly? I should start filing bugs against them.
> Give your box an GUID as its canonical name, if you want. Change at
> every boot, if you want. Add a .local suffix to it to make it a FQDN
> (since too much stuff is too broken to undestand a top-level FQDN). As
> long as it is resovable by the box itself, that's a perfectly fully
> functional canonical host name.
I don't see why I should have to do any of those things just to satisfy
your misreading of the POSIX standard, when in practice the applications I
run seem to work just fine. If there are buggy applications that break,
they should be fixed.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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