On April 16, 2016 12:50:43 AM CDT, Trevor Cordes trevor@tecnopolis.ca wrote:

...

on muug.ca (new server):

#hostname muug

This valid? Done for a reason? Should it be muug.ca?

On 2016-04-16 Adam Thompson wrote:

Hostname is - and always has - been specified as the bare name, not the FQDN.

Hmm, that's opposite to what I've understood for 25 years, and what I've done on every machine I've ever been responsible for (all of which that have "worked").

But you made me think about it a bit, and why I do it this way. Thinking back I distinctly recall that my personal AIX box in '95 would freak out (like not boot, or take forever to boot) when the hostname wasn't FQDN. Back then it was tricky because I didn't actually own a domain name to use, so I had to make something up. I've done it this way ever since.

Thinking more about what is right/wrong *now*, I find: http://serverfault.com/questions/331936/setting-the-hostname-fqdn-or-short-n...

Which basically hints that it's a) vendor specific (i.e. RH vs Deb), and b) personal preference. No consensus (there or elsewhere) by a mile, but it appears there is a bias towards hostname NOT being FQDN.

For me, being an all-Fedora guy, if "RHEL deployment guide" says use FQDN, then that's a good enough excuse for me! And I've never had any issues...

I would do a survey of machines I can access, but all I can access are ones I've built, along with lisa.muug.mb.ca, and lisa says: #hostname lisa.muug.mb.ca

I'd be interested to see how the computers at, say, the U of M answer that question... (Strangely, much of my computing preference to this very day stems from interesting quirks of U of M's setup from my long days as a student.)

YP/NIS domain, not DNS. Any apps that break this way are broken, period.

The reason I brought it up is that apache on new muug.ca was guessing its host/domainname wrong and doing wonky things with rewrites until I added a ServerName directive to make it explicit. But that might have been a red herring with regards to this whole question.

Final note, maybe the One Systemd To Rule Them All will settle this once and for all, as I'm pretty sure hostname is now under systemd purview (gobbled up like everything else)...