Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 19:40:09 +0100 (CET) From: Oliver Fromme <olli@secnetix.de> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Resolver Issues (non valid hostname characters) Message-ID: <200303251840.h2PIe9EK004915@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <086701c2f2ed$1f7ecd90$e1db7bd1@kenxp>
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Ken Menzel <kenm@icarz.com> wrote: > I am not sure where you think freebsd needs support for underscores in > the resolver. > freebsd2# hostname -s free_bsd2 > freebsd2# hostname > free_bsd2.icarz.com > freebsd2#vi /etc/hosts (edit host file here adding new name) > freebsd2# ping free_bsd2 > PING free_bsd2.icarz.com (207.99.22.11): 56 data bytes > 64 bytes from 207.99.22.11: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.128 ms Neither the machine's hostname nor /etc/hosts have got anything to do with DNS or BIND. In fact, you can set the machine's hostname to anything you like, including not setting it at all, or setting it to something completely different from the machine's DNS name. It might confuse a few programs or scripts, though. In fact, I was working for some time on a Solaris machine before I noticed that its hostname was "-s" (yes, a dash followed by the letter s). It turned out that a cow-orker had run a configure script of some crappy Linux software a few days before. That configure script used "hostname -s" to find out the hostname, but that particular version of Solaris did not support that option. Instead, it just set the hostname to whatever was given as the first argument. On another pool of machines, /etc/hosts contains MAC addresses. Those wouldn't be legal names in DNS (because of the colons), but they work perfectly fine in /etc/hosts, so you can easily lookup and ping MAC addresses. That has been very handy in that environment. But in DNS, anything except letters, digits and dashes is not allowed (apart from the separating dots, of course). Regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way. "If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." -- God in Futurama season 4 episode 8 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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