This one time, at band camp, Michael Heironimus said: > 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. OK, this is where I was getting hung up, forgetting about 'order hosts, bind' in hosts.conf. So, for others who may have this problem (especially with sqwebmail, which is what started this tail-chasing) this was the solution. steve@mercury:~$ cat /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost 216.158.52.98 mail.lobefin.net mercury adsl-216-158-52-98-cust.oldcity.dca.net This makes it correspond to: steve@mercury:~$ hostname mercury steve@mercury:~$ hostname -a mercury adsl-216-158-52-98-cust.oldcity.dca.net steve@mercury:~$ hostname -s mail steve@mercury:~$ hostname -d lobefin.net steve@mercury:~$ hostname -i 216.158.52.98 steve@mercury:~$ hostname -f mail.lobefin.net sqwebmail by contrast, runs on top of courier-mta, and gets it's hstname settings from there. courier-mta apparently looks for /etc/courier/domainname, and if it doesn't find it, looks up the hostname with hostname -f. This is why this box kept setting all outgoing webmail to $USER@mail.lobefin.net, instead of @lobefin.net. So, put one line in new file /etc/courier/domainname and joy on all fronts. Thanks, Michael for all your help, and making me think again. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- |Stephen Gran | Cat, n.: Lapwarmer with built-in buzzer. | |steve@lobefin.net | | |http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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