On 30-07-13 22:57, Russ Allbery wrote: > Christoph Anton Mitterer <cales...@scientia.net> writes: > >> - The system hostname (and domainname if any) should ALWAYS be >> resolvable, whether a network is up or not, regardless of which. >> (Assuming that lo is always up, if not, many things break anyway.) > > This principal (and the general UNIX tradition of putting the local host > and IP address in /etc/hosts) has caused us no end of problems, since that > information inevitably gets out of date when systems are moved around or > re-IP'd. We now do not put the local hostname anywhere in /etc/hosts, and > I believe that's the correct configuration for any system with stable DNS > and network.
Agreed; however, for mobile systems, assuming stable networking (or even the existence of any networking at all) is just plain wrong; and since there are very good reasons why "ping $(hostname)" and similar things should work, I think at least a single line with the local hostname should be in /etc/hosts. I think using 127.0.1.1 is a bad idea; I wasn't part of the original discussion, but I've only ever seen problems with it, and I never understood why we switched to that in the first place. The right way, in my opinion, is that /etc/hosts should look like this: 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1 hostname.domain hostname or, alternatively: 127.0.0.1 hostname.domain hostname localhost both make "hostname" output the hostname as specified in /etc/hostname, and "hostname --fqdn" output the FQDN. It also doesn't result in any problems with IP address changes in my experience, since 127.0.0.1 should always be correct; the only exception is when the hostname is actually _changed_, but then you have to change other files anyway (/etc/hostname, for instance), so at that point it shouldn't matter too much. -- This end should point toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today. -- http://xkcd.com/1133/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51f927a1.3050...@debian.org
