On 2009-12-29 00:21:45 +0000, Sam Morris wrote: > On Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:03:12 +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > Programs may need the FQDN, even without any network connection (for > > instance, even local mail messages should have a Message-Id). And > > /etc/hostname doesn't necessarily contain the FQDN. > > Hm, but shouldn't they use another method to get it? My laptop has no > FQDN when it is not connected to a network, and even when it is, it has
I think this is bad (POSIX seems to assume that all machines have a FQDN). > never, to my knowledge, had a fully qualified name that could be resolved > to find out its network address. The goal of the FQDN is not to find "its network address" (which is rather meaningless, because a network address is related to a network interface, not to the machine). Having the FQDN resolved to 127.0.1.1 on the machine is fine. > Conversely, I have used servers that had multiple network interfaces, > some of which even have multiple network addresses assigned to them. > 'hostname -f' did not yield a sensible result on a couple of these > systems. What do you mean by "sensible result"? I think you're assuming too much concerning "hostname -f". > What would a hypothetical host that only had IPv6 connectivity do? You still have the IPv4 loopback. > We certainly don't have a line analogous to the '127.0.1.1' hack in > /etc/ hosts for ipv6, and I'm not even sure what such a line would > look like, since ::1 has a /128 netmask. Do you mean that you don't want to use IPv4 at all and that the loopback interface only provides IPv6 addresses? > As for mail, we already appear to have an /etc/mailname file for MTAs and > MUAs to use for finding out the 'canonical' name of the host for message- > IDs and the like. /etc/mailname doesn't seem to be specified by POSIX, so that I doubt that all mail software uses it in practice (Mutt doesn't seem to use it... its way to get the FQDN is currently buggy, but that's another story). -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
