Re: Revisiting the hostname/FQDN issue, adding libnss-myhostname
Timo Röhling <roehling@debian.org> writes:
> Hi Richard,
>
> * Richard Lewis <richard.lewis.debian@googlemail.com> [2025-10-18 *
> 15:53]:
>>I think the missing bit of explanation in this thread is: why would
>>anyone know "apollo" but not "appollo.example.com"? both of these
>>strings are written by the admin in /etc/hosts which is a file that has
>>probably never been changed (and probably doesnt tell you anything much
>>about reaching the system externally)
> AFAIK the name is treated as an opaque string, so while Tradition
> tells you to set the unqualified hostname, there is no technical
> reason why you cannot set the fully qualified "apollo.example.com" as
> hostname. And some people do that; I guess it is one of the
> contradicting traditions Simon talked about elsethread.
>
>>ie - what is the actual problem these settings are trying to solve?
> A lot of software assumes that it can always resolve the local
> hostname to an IP address (and vice versa look up the associated
> hostname of an assigned IP address). That remains true even if you set
> the hostname fully-qualified, so unless you have a permanent, reliable
> connection to a DNS server that serves your domain, you probably want
> the /etc/hosts entry; otherwise you may encounter random timeouts
> while interacting with network daemons on your host.
This was really helpul, thanks - ive edited marc's wiki page
https://wiki.debian.org/Hostname to try and explain this
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