[16044] in Athena Bugs
Re: sgi 8.2.8: hostname/rc.conf
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Jul 28 20:01:14 1998
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 20:01:07 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Karen Walrath N1XUL <karen@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[16043] in Athena Bugs"
> Did you really need to break all of our scripts? Shouldn't the
> default behavior be the same as before, with a new option to
> hostname that returns the fully qualified hostname? All other
> versions of unix return just the host name, without the domain.
I apologize for the inconvenience. There are a couple of practical
reasons for the change to FQDNs in the kernel hostname variable:
* It's pretty standard outside of Athena, despite your
assertion that "all other versions of unix" do otherwise.
(This isn't a version-of-Unix issue, this is a machine
configuration issue.) Some applications even rely on this
behavior to some degree; for instance, the BIND resolver
derives the default search domain from the hostname.
* People run Athena machines with FQDNs other than
foo.mit.edu. This change makes it easier to support those
machines properly.
