systemd: please stop trying to take over the world :)

[Simo Sorce]

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