Use Domain In Hostname Or Not?

[George Robbins]

In article <22554 at mimsy.umd.edu> chris at mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:
> In article <2929 at decuac.DEC.COM> avolio at decuac.dec.com (Frederick M. Avolio)
> writes:
> >The fact is, the fully qualified domain name *is* the hostname.
> 
> The reason you should set your host name to your FQDN is the same as
> the reason you should write your own full name on any form letter or
> credit-card application or survey or whatever.

It is worth noting that when you do change from simple to fully qualified
name, that you will have to modify your sendmail.cf file, your news setup
and other things that make use of your host name and assume that somehow
they should combine the `hostname` plus some kind of domain information
to create and "external" host name.  Yeah, /etc/exports and the like also.

Ancient versions of Ultrix uucp will puke and die given a hostname that
returns move than ~8 characters and don't understand that a dot is of
some significance.  It isn't to hard to patch in a hard-coded host name,
but you gotta do it in half-a-dozen places.

You can generally create aliases either thru /etc/hosts or nameservers that
allow the humans to specify the traditional local part or the fully qualified
name...

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,     uucp:   {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing:   domain: grr at cbmvax.commodore.com
Commodore, Engineering Department     phone:  215-431-9349 (only by moonlite)