On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 6:25 PM, Andrew Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 6:14 PM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
>> <zbyszek@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.

The idea is that the hostname is randomly generated at install time.
It definitely is constant. And speaking from experience, not including
the hostname in DHCP requests breaks quite a few user expectations
(especially the ability to identify the computer by name).