On Sat, 2004-03-20 at 06:04, Ed Skinner wrote:
> On Friday 19 March 2004 21:50, Craig White wrote:
> > actually, sorry to take issue with your reply but ".localdomain" is for
> > your purposes a domain - the same as any other except that it is what is
> > provided for 'standard' out of the box. Even taking your computer to
> > another office / lan setting is not material since you will not have any
> > problems accessing resources simply because you have assigned a FQDN to
> > the hostname function...   localhost.localdomain is a fqdn, albeit
> > entirely generic.
> 
>      Thanks for this, and the other, clarifications. I'm still trying to 
> understand just what's going on. Let me see if I can recap this.
> 1) The local system needs to know both its hostname and its domain (both of 
> which compose the fully-qualified domain name).
----
Actually, your problem was that sendmail was trying to figure out what
the fqdn name was on startup. If you have hosts: files dns in
/etc/nsswitch, then it will look first at your hosts file and then try
to resolve the name via dns (hence the long pause). The local system
itself is happy with whatever is in /etc/sysconfig/network or where ever
your system is designed to get it's hostname
---
> 2) The /etc/hosts file needs to contain the local system's name in its 
> fully-qualified form (I haven't tried this with ONLY the fully-qualified 
> name: I've only done the opposite).
---
see above
---
> 3) The hostname portion may be changed via the hostname command but that 
> change is lost when the system is rebooted.
---
yes
---
> And 4) [and this is where things get a little mushy in my mind], 
> ".localdomain" is automatically supplied as the domain name when it is 
> otherwise missing, and should, therefore, be added (by hand) to /etc/hosts in 
> those situations.
>      How's that?
>      A related question is where *should* the domain name be defined? I've 
> been told by others that it should *not* appear in the HOSTNAME=xxxxx line in 
> /etc/sysconfig/network but I don't know why.
---
A typical sendmail distribution would set the hostname to
localhost.localdomain by default. At sendmail startup, it tries to
verify if that is indeed the hostname of the computer it is running on
(see above or man resolver). Most distro's would come with the line
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost at the top of /etc/hosts. This
should be enough to make sendmail start happy. If you change the
hostname value in /etc/sysconfig/network (or your ifcfg), then this is
where the resolver system will cause startup lags trying to verify that
this indeed is a proper hostname...hence the value of matching the value
of supplied hostnames in either /etc/hosts or dns.

Craig

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