Re: set domain name in Debian `

[Glenn English <ghe2001@gmail.com>]

> On Nov 14, 2016, at 6:27 AM, Greg Wooledge <wooledg@eeg.ccf.org> wrote:
> 
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 08:50:46AM -0700, Glenn English wrote:
>>> On Nov 12, 2016, at 3:25 AM, Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> wrote:
>>> I am 95% confident that the reason that Glenn's system thinks the
>>> FQDN is "www.slsware.dmz" is because the first instance of "srv" in
>>> the /etc/hosts is:
>>> 
>>>>> 192.168.2.203	www.slsware.dmz 		wsd srv

Who'da thunk it -- it's looking at the aliases in hosts, and grabbing the first one where the alias matches the hostname. If it sees any. I thought it was looking at IPs. But the way I had it set up, it wouldn't have worked that way either.

DNS wouldn't have worked either, if it's doing a reverse lookup. Not with this ghastly IP net I'm setting up -- there are several services on one server, so FTP and WWW both have the same IP. It would just do the first one, I suspect.

I rebooted with a perfectly good and unique IP and FQDN and an alias that didn't match the hostname, and it came up with an empty domain. I put in an alias (unique) the same as the hostname, and there was the domain. I didn't even have to reboot (Jessie, if it matters).

Thanks very much to all. This has been an educational experience. I guess I've been lucky with positioning for these 15 years.

I'm not going to toss hosts, though. I need to be able to move around the nets when DNS is down (or misconfigured). I'm just going to be a little bit more careful...

-- 
Glenn English