Victor Duchovni wrote: > On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 10:46:47PM -0400, Matt Hayes wrote: > >> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=214741 >> >> Now, I'm not all that bright on how postfix sorts out the hostname, and >> frankly, I don't care, but I don't like people saying its a 'bug' when I >> have no problems following configuration directives. >> >> Can someone PLEASE explain this in clear terms as to what they are >> complaining about? > > An MTA needs a stable set of names for the domains listed in mydestination, > so that locally originated mail delivered locally is repliable. A laptop > with a DHCP-based FQDN is not a good candidate for defaulting the local > domain to the (volatile) FQDN of the host. > > Setting myhostname to "shortname.localdomain" is FAR preferable to picking > up some random DHCP (or reverse DNS lookup) supplied domain and becoming > an open relay for sub-domains of your ISP's domain or being unable to > reply to previously delivered local email.
Said laptop should probably hardcode 'myhostname' and 'mydomainname' in main.cf. > In addition, Postfix operates correctly on stand-alone hosts, that > are not networked delivering local email between local users. There > must not be network dependencies in local mail delivery. > > Operating Postfix on a laptop typically requires some of the configuration > options listed in SOHO_README.html. > > The authors of the bug report have not thought this through. The bug > report is spurious. > > If they want the O/S distribution to fully configure a SOHO Postfix during > system installation, the Debian laptop profile would have to ask the user > for a list of user accounts and their mappings to external ISP mailboxes, > as well as submission server settings and passwords, ... This is a lot > of complexity to deal with at install-time. > > Far simpler to just deliver all local (cron, ...) mail locally, and > to expect the laptop user to use Thunderbird, Evolution, ... rather > than mutt or Pine via a local Postfix. To clarify again: I'm not coming from the laptop angle, I just happen to have been bitten by the same problem. My point is: When 'myhostname' and 'mydomainname' are left out of main.cf then postfix makes an attempt to auto-detect them. This auto-detection does not currently follow what other tools like 'hostname' do, and not what the man-pages of gethostname()/uname(), getdomainname() suggest. You suggest this auto-detection is deliberately done wrong to protect users on misconfigured hosts from themselves. I'd argue this is a bad trade-off, as it forces people that *have* properly configured hosts to duplicate their FQDN in main.cf - which would not be required if the auto-detection worked as expected. Anyways, in order not to break backwards compatibility, how about leaving the default behaviour as is, but introducing something like 'myhostname = $auto', 'mydomainname = $auto' (or whatever magic value that can not be a real hostname) which then does the "full" hostname detection the same way that 'hostname -f' does? Cheers, Moe