Re: How do I set a domain name?

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Lo, on Tuesday, November 13, Williasm Dowling did write:
                                   ^

Minor nit, but it looks like you've got a typo in your MUA configuration.

> I am having trouble installing exim; when it fails it says:
> hostname: Unknown host
> hostname --fqdn gave non-zero exit code 256   
> 
> I do not have a registered domain name; I suppose I need to set something
> fake like home.net.

You could use your ISP's domain, but it tends to work better if you use a
fake domain, like home.net or home.wxd or whatever.

[Reformatted for 72 columns]

> The man page for hostname says I can query but not set the domainname,
> and suggests using /etc/hosts and/or /etc/host.conf, but the man pages
> for those are not quite explicit enough for me to get something to
> work.  I am using dhcp (pump, actually) to get an IP, so I can't
> hard-code an IP anywhere. I have tried quite a few combinations in the
> config files w/o luck; hostname --fqdn always fails.

I have a similar situation at work and puzzled through this a while
back.  The fix is to edit /etc/hosts, but you're right, this is not
entirely clear from the manpages.

> ====== /etc/hosts   =============
> 127.0.0.1 	localhost
> # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
> # (added automatically by netbase upgrade)
> ::1     ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
> fe00::0 ip6-localnet
> ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
> ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
> ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
> ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Since you use DHCP for an address, change the first line to read

127.0.0.1   <FQDN>  <HOSTNAME>  localhost

where <FQDN> is your fully-qualified domain name (with the fake domain)
and <HOSTNAME> is the machine's hostname, as printed by `uname -n' and
stored in /etc/hostname.  In the language of the hosts(5) manpage, the
FQDN is your canonical_hostname, so it has to be the first name after
the IP address; the order of the other names is not significant.

If you had a static IP, you'd put your FQDN and HOSTNAME on the line
with your statically assigned IP instead.

Then, edit /etc/host.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf to make sure that you
search /etc/hosts for hostnames at some point in the process.  Usually,
you want it to search there first, but this is probably not necessary.

That should get you going.

HTH,

Richard