Hi,
Here's the original question...
============
Could someone please discuss the pros and cons of setting the HOSTNAME
variable in /etc/rc.config to something like blue.rad.med.umich.edu vs.
blue. Over the years, we've done it both ways, and it hasn't seemed to
matter (although we recently had a conflict with another machine on campus
that may have been due to use of the "short form"). In various /etc/hosts
files and in DNS entries, our machines are generally know by both their
fully qualified names and by their "short forms". So my question really
deals with setting HOSTNAME _locally_ (and therefore what is returned by
the hostname command).
============
Thanks to the following for their replies:
Dan Harrington <dan.harrington_at_av.com>...
If you set the hostname to the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) you can
always determine the short/local hostname (e.g. via 'hostname -s'),
whereas the reverse is not true. Also, various scripts and networking
applications check to see what domain they're in by checking the hostname,
and make decisions or assumptions based on the result.
Carl Gaines <cgaine_at_acxiom.com>...
We ran into a problem with sendmail. Mail with a fully qualified
host name was rejected by some servers because they were doing a reverse dns
lookup and the fully qualified name was not a valid dns name. This may or
may not impact you.
------------------
I hope this info is useful.
Peyton
University of Michigan, Radiology
voice: 734-647-0849
FAX: 734-764-8541
e-mail: bland_at_umich.edu
URL:
http://www.med.umich.edu/dipl/
Received on Tue Nov 14 2000 - 16:58:07 NZDT