On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> <zbyszek(a)in.waw.pl> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 05:25:36PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
>>> On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 04:49:42PM -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>>>> SUSE generates a random name of the format linux-XXXXXX (I'm not sure
how many
>>>> My proposal is that we should consider changing the default hostname for
Fedora
>>>> 26 to be either FED-XXXXXXXXXXX or FEDORA-XXXXXXXX. The former allows for
a
>>>
>>> How about non-yelly Fedora-XXXXXXXXXXX? Since SUSE apparently does
>>> lower case, that should be fine, right?
>>
>> Bastian Nocera also filed
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1392925,
>> where he proposes "fedora" as the hostname. I think "fedora"
is better than
>> "localhost", and a non-constant hostname would be even better.
>> For interactive installs (like with anaconda) it would be great if we could
>> ask for the hostname. For non-interactive ones, "Fedora-[0-9a-z-]{8}"
seems
>> like a good option (*). It would give "branding", and solve the freeipa
issues.
>> It would also be a good default for the interactive case, so that people can
>> "click through" without having to pick anything.
>>
>> (*) The suffix could include dashes for more possibilities, but they should
>> not be adjacent or at the end.
>
> I'm in favor of defaulting to "Fedora-[0-9a-z-]{8}" myself. However,
> I'm concerned that people don't realize that we can, in fact, set the
> hostname during installation. People usually don't because Anaconda
> doesn't currently make that mandatory or otherwise note that it's
> possible during the initial panel of spokes (hint: it's the networking
> spoke), and so the default of "localhost" continues on without anyone
> being the wiser.
>
>
If the hostname is non-constant, can we also arrange that, by default,
this hostname is never sent over the network? In particular, I think
that DHCP requests should *not* include this hostname. We're already
starting to randomize MAC addresses -- there's no reason to give a
persistent per-installation identifier to every network.
If this is a problem (and I'm not necessarily convinced it is), it's a problem
already for anyone using DHCP who set a hostname manually. The fact that the
default happens to be constant (and therefore indistinguishable) is a side-effect.
If this is something that is genuinely concerning from a privacy point of view,
then that should be changed in the DHCP client software rather than at the
default hostname level. If it's not acceptable to send a unique default hostname
then it must be equally unacceptable to send a manually selected hostname. (At
least a randomly-generated one is only unique; a chosen one may in fact be
possible to use for individual identification as well.)