Problem setting up wired networking

[Jesse Keating]

On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 12:00 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> 
> And that problem is?  How this is different if you would always set
> a name of that machine to jesse.keating.box?  Nowhere says that what
> is returned by 'hostname' needs really be the same what a name
> resolution will return.  Moreover machines very often have multiple
> names, even with a single network interface, although 'hostname'
> will show the only one.

The problem is that various pieces of software would bind to what was
returned by 'hostname', or to the IP address that was resolved out of
querying the hostname.  And when either the hostname changes, or the
result of querying the hostname changes, those pieces of software broke.

> 
> > Either your hostname would have to change, or the hosts entry for what
> > it resolved to would have to change, because your address is changing.
> 
> Your name to the outside world, are returned by a name resolution,
> will change.  That is true.  That does not mean that your machine
> has to be known as localhost.localdomain. 

Nobody said it has to be known as that.  You're free to name your
machine whatever you want.  Automatically naming it (and changing it)
based on DHCP returns isn't exactly the "right" thing to do all the
time.

>  
> 
> By your arguments it appears that you imagine that a machine with
> multiple network interfaces is an instant disaster.  Surprise!
> There are many like that around.

Not at all.  My arguments are that when you set and change your hostname
to reflect whatever dhcp results of the moment you're getting (which is
what has happened with the good ole "network" service) things can and do
break.  It's not a good scenario to be in.

> 
> > And if that previous address is still resolvable via dns (think vpn
> > access back to the home) you're now overriding dns which is wrong.
> 
> You do not have "that previous address" now.  You kept a displayed
> name.  This is how it works with currently existing laptops for
> years and years.  If you called it jesse.keating.box then this is
> how it will look from a prompt does not matter where you will go
> with it.
> 
> > The work around I had was to set hostname up once, resolve it to
> > 127.0.0.1 and call it a day.
> 
> You are missing the point.  This is not an issue for a laptop or
> if you have two boxes around.  That is a great headache if you are
> launching few hundreds clients on a network and they are not going
> anywhere, because they are part of a big lab or nodes in a cluster,
> and all report that they are called 'localhost.localdomain'.  And
> no - pre-assigning fixed names is not feasible or desirable.  If you
> do not want to see a name of your machine to "float" then you just
> assign one to it from the very beginning.  It is that simple.

In a lab such as that, it is quite trivial to use %pre to determine an
appropriate automatic hostname to use and set it within the kickstart
with %include.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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