Re: RFC (round 2): Change the default hostname for Fedora 26+

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On 11/11/2016 12:08 PM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 11.11.16 11:12, Stephen Gallagher (sgallagh@xxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> 
>> The hostname may always be set manually and the result will (for the vast
>> majority of people) be unique within their environment. This means that if we
>> are concerned with hostname leakage being a privacy issue, we need to address
>> that at the leakage point, not at the hostname point.
>>
>> Also, there are cases where hostname leakage may be used specifically *because*
>> it may be unique, such as one of several cues to the DHCP server. Unfortunately,
>> we cannot know in advance whether a DHCP server is going to be on a trusted or
>> untrusted network (we might be able to guess from the SSID of a WiFI connection,
>> but those are remarkably easy to fake).
>>
>> In short, I really don't think that the hostname is the right place to solve
>> this problem. If transmission of individually-identifying information is a
>> concern, then we really have to solve it at the transmission points and not at
>> the source.
>>
>> Yes, an argument could be made that a user who sets her own hostname is
>> "opting-in" to that uniqueness, but I think that's setting an unrealistic
>> expectation on all of our users that they fully understand the consequences of
>> that action.
> 
> I still believe we should stick to a generic hostname by default,
> (though I'd rather use "localhost" than "localhost.localdomain" in
> order to drop the redhatism that "localdomain" is), and make the IPA
> client-side enrollment code automatically update to a more "unique"
> hostname if the hostname is found to be unset or be "localhost".
> 
> I am also pretty sure that DHCP clients should suppress sending local
> hostname information if the local hostname is unset or "localhost".
>


I realize that some of this is coming from my old-school sensibilities, but I
still remember a time when changing the hostname of a running system caused lots
of things to fail, including NFS and sendmail.

Changing the enrolling code to modify the machine's hostname would be very
unexpected from an end-user perspective, don't you think?



>> * I like Zbigniew and Lennart's thoughts on how to generate the "random" suffix.
>> the implementation I'd likely use is to take the first eight characters of an
>> md5 (or SHA) hash of /etc/machine-id and use those. That should make it both
>> repeatable and unique.
> 
> Please do not use MD5 anymore. And please calculate your ID as
> 
>        SHA(x || k)
> 

See child reply. I was trying to spare us some entropy during early setup, but I
can't think of any reason this needs to be any more complicated than something
fed from /dev/random if we aren't going to try to generate it early in the
install process.


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