Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 15:03:13 -0700 From: garys@opusnet.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Aaron Peterson <dopplecoder@gmail.com> Cc: "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Change of FQDN Message-ID: <ybslybhivy.lyb@mail.opusnet.com> In-Reply-To: <45d750d20507181013a90065f@mail.gmail.com> (Aaron Peterson's message of "Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:13:45 -0400") References: <1121706617.14792.3.camel@lmail.bathnetworks.co.uk> <45d750d20507181013a90065f@mail.gmail.com>
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Aaron Peterson <dopplecoder@gmail.com> writes: > hostname="www.mydomain.com" Say I have two Ethernet ports and I'd like to be gary.mydomain.com on one and gary2.mydomain.com or gary.mydomain2.com on the other; then what? A computer's domain name is set in several places -- not always the same values. Most commonly they're in DNS servers and /etc/hosts and, of course, the computer's kernel as set by the "hostname" command (eg, using /etc/rc.conf's "hostname" variable). But since there's only one "hostname" setting, which can't always match all the others, it's never made sense to me to set "hostname" to any public Internet domain name. (And I never have, IIRC.) And according to BCP-32, at http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt, "localhost" is the traditional top-level domain name "pointing to the loop back IP address" (which I think of as the 127/24 network), and it should be used to help keep broken DNS software from using any bogus domain on the Internet except well-known ones like "localhost". Though the "hostname" command allows use of a top-level domain, other software doesn't (eg, "sendmail"), so it seems that a good domain is "something.localhost", where "something" may be "localhost", which might avoid some problems with broken software, or something more creative and maybe assigned uniquely to each of a group of computers. It is not used in the public (or maybe even a private) DNS system, except as an identifier for log files. Am I missing something? It's quite likely. What other software than sendmail needs my single "hostname" and when?
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