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Re: where is /etc/hosts supposed to come from?



On Sun, Dec 27, 2009 at 10:38:58PM -0800, John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
> Brian May wrote:
> > 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".
> > 
> > I believe mail servers these days generally use /etc/mailname, not hostname -f
> > (although hostname -f might be the default for /etc/mailname).
> > 
> > I consider using hostname -f for anything other then the initial default value
> > broken because computers can have multiple network cards, multiple IP
> > addresses, multiple domains, etc. I generally like to assume my computer isn't
> > going to break badly because I have to change the output hostname -f returns.
> 
> This is one place where Solaris has gotten this right: /etc/nodename
> refers to the system itself, while each interface has its own (cf:
> /etc/hostname.hme0).

Except /etc/hostname.hme0 doesn't need to contain a hostname, but a
set of ifconfig arguments. That the first argument after the interface
can be a hostname if it is defined in /etc/hosts is only a (useful) plus.
But you can have various other information in /etc/hostname.hme0, such
as the IPMP group.

Mike


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