On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 10:21 -0400, Simo Sorce wrote: > On Tue, 2011-06-14 at 14:08 +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > On Tue, 14.06.11 07:25, Simo Sorce (simo@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote: > > > > > > > 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 ? > > > > No, systemd will initialize it at boot and is happy if you change it later. > > As I thought, then I see no problem here. systemd might be happy if you change it later, but other stuff is not. The canonical example is X, where the hostname was used as the xauth key to allow you to actually talk to the X server. When the hostname changed, there was no authorization for the new hostname in your xauth file, so starting new apps would silently fail. Basing *anything* like that on your machine hostname is just stupid. It might work for you, but it doesn't work for lots of other people, so lets fix it for everyone. And we did back in the F10 timeframe with /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/localuser.sh where we just let any local user connect, since that's exactly what xauth's hostname thing was supposed to do anyway. The next example is apps that try to find out your IP address by looking up your hostname. That's completely broken too. Do you have multiple interfaces? Multiple IP addresses? Are you behind NAT? Yeah, all that will torpedo hostname->IP lookups. Hostnames are *informational* and are never a good way to identify anything concrete on a local machine. That didn't used to be the case, but now it is. Things change in 40 years. Dan -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
