On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 09:53 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Changing a machine hostname at random times is just asking for
> trouble.
Well, but it has been used in the past, and as definitely something we
should support in one way or another.
Never said we shouldn't allow it to change, just that if you do some
things may break in more or less evident ways.
Which is why we have this:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/nssmyhostname
and
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/hostnamed
and there are even people working on sending out change notifications
from /proc/sys/kernel/hostname in the kernel.
> What's the problem of having a specific hostname set up at boot
time ?
The user might want to change it?
Does setting it at boot time prevent you from changing it later ?
DHCP wants to change it? Name conflict in the local network, and
Avahi
wants to change it? Of course, the latter we don't necessarily want to
do by default, but they are valid uses.
There is always good reasons to change it at one time or another, none
of these say it is a bad idea to set it early though.
In general I see 3 categories of machine:
- diskless machines that needs to get the hostname from DHCP as they
have no local configuration storage whatsoever
- personal, un-managed machines that can change name on a whim.
- managed machines, that may have keytabs and can never change name but
use things like dynDNS instead to tell other machines where they are.
Simo.
--
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York