> You think of hostname, look for /etc/hostname, and find something unrelated. > The file /etc/hostname does not exist. > The files /etc/hostname.if do exist, but have nothing to do with the host > name. > By comparison, in linux /etc/hostname exists and serves the intended purpose. > This is not intuitive. > To understand where the host name is written in OpenBSD, you need to read > hostname(1). > According to hostname(1) and /etc/rc, the file /etc/myname is responsible for > holding the name of a host. > Why diverging from intuition?
There is no such thing like an "intuition". The hostname persists within a data structure in the kernel, while the system is running. During a system's boot this information can be reattained through a variety of mechanisms that is typically OS specific. Whether an OS saves this name in a variable in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf or somewhere else is not important - any persistance mechanism is only read once at boot time to initialize the kernel hostname. Linux people decided to invent a file called /etc/hostname which YOU think its intuitive According to uname(3) this string is named 'nodename' and thats why I think Sun OS's /etc/nodename was the most intuitive. So we have two definitions of intuitive now - who will win?
