scs@iti.org (Steve Simmons) (02/15/90)
Over the years I've noticed that most folks set the hostname to the fully qualified domain name. We've always made them simple hostnames, then relied on proper sendmail.cfs, etc, to add our domain as appropriate. Recently we've bumped into some vendor software bugs for which the workaround is to make hostname == FQDN. The vendor agrees their performance isn't correct, but we're not likely to see a real fix in the next couple of days. We're loathe to do things different on 'just one machine', and would prefer consistancy. I'm interested in any and all comments on why or why not to set hostname to FQDN.
emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (02/15/90)
Fully qualified domain names in the hostname is generally 4.3 behavior, as opposed to 4.2 which only had the first part. Biggest hassle is that when you have names as long as ours, e.g. dirichlet.math.lsa.umich.edu -- it's a hassle to have csh prompts with the full name in it. Also you'll tickle some bugs in some vendors software (e.g. SunOS 4.0.3 lockd) where they have buffers of less than MAXDNAME (arpa/nameser.h) to hold hostnames. The csh business is fixable for new users but it's harder to try to retrofit old users stuff piecemeal. Which bugs are you running into -- I might be seeing the same ones.... --Ed