Quoting Daniel Senie <dts@xxxxxxxxx>:
This business of the installer tossing the host name on the 127.0.0.1 line of /etc/hosts is silly, and results in a known step in every installation of a server that says "go edit /etc/hosts, remove host name". I'm sure it helps something, somewhere, but it makes a mess in server environments.
It helps workstations/laptops/whatever that don't have IP address at all (or at least not permanently). That way they can always resolve their own hostname to 127.0.0.1.
Of course, it would be nice if installer was doing the right thing if networking was configured with static IP address by generating "two line" /etc/hosts file (instead of one liner). Having your own static IP address in /etc/hosts file is a good thing in case DNS/NIS/LDAP/whatever name service becomes unavailable (due to networking glitch, or more permanent damange happens). That way at least local stuff will still work OK. Also, there might be stuff in init.d that depends on beign able to resolve local machine's name to an IP address before networking is available (usually such stuff should go after network script, but from time to time something slips). The only downside of having host's static IP address in /etc/hosts is if you are chaning the host's IP address. Easy to forget to update /etc/hosts. However, if you have a habit of placing it into every /etc/hosts, it just becomes second nature to update /etc/hosts when changing host's IP address. Esp. if you have Solaris hosts in the mix (where IP address to be assigned to an interface is read from /etc/hosts by default).
I guess Red Hat might be reluctant to fix this. By doing the "right thing" they'd probably get way more support calls from clueless newbees that installed RHEL on their laptops, than they are getting now from sysadmins that installed it on their server(s) (for example, sysadmin skipped morning coffe and as direct result of it haven't rechecked the obvious thing to check -- quite understandable).
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