Re: hostname questions

[Michael Heironimus <mkh01@earthlink.net>]

On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 05:38:54PM -0500, Stephen Gran wrote:
> Which still isn't quite right - the FQDN should be mail.lobefin.net.
> 
> steve:~$ host mercury.lobefin.net
> mercury.lobefin.net     A       216.158.52.108
> steve:~$ host mail.lobefin.net
> mail.lobefin.net        A       216.158.52.98
> 
> I never got around to having my ISP add mercury.lobefin.net to the list
> of names for 216.158.52.98, so I'm not sure where --fqdn is getting this
> from.

hostname uses the local files for all of its information, not DNS or any
other naming service. hostname tells you what the machine thinks its own
name is, DNS tells you what everybody else thinks the machine's name is.
If you want the machine to think its own name is mercury and use that
for your shell prompt, it sounds like you've probably got what you want
(the rest of the world looks at the DNS entry).

Since the A record for the machine is mail.lobefin.net, I suppose that
the correct way would actually be for the machine to have "mail" as its
hostname, but it should work fine this way as long as you have your MTA
set up to accept mail for every name it should (since it's the MX for
lobefin.net I'll assume that you already have that done).

As for sqwebmail, I know nothing about that package. A lot of MUAs have
a configuration option for setting the domain. It seems to me that it
would be especially important for a webmail application to have a way to
configure the default mail domain for all users, though.

-- 
Michael Heironimus