Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!spool.mu.edu!news.cs.indiana.edu!nstn.ns.ca!cs.dal.ca!silvert
From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Nameserver side effects
Message-ID: <1991Jun23.145151.8517@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 23 Jun 91 14:51:51 GMT
Article-I.D.: cs.1991Jun23.145151.8517
Distribution: na
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 21

I recently posted a query about running a nameserver on a PI, and
several people pointed out correctly that I could solve my problems by
using a fully qualified name in /etc/sys_id, i.e. editing it to read
"biome.bio.ns.ca" instead of just "biome".  This turns out to have an
unfortunate side effect though -- uname now returns the first 8
characters, namely "biome.bi", which confuses all kinds of software.
For example, I can no longer uucp to other systems, since they don't
recognize "biome.bi".

I hacked this by putting in a couple of hostname calls in uudemon.poll,
but this is pretty crude.  I'm wondering whether anything else got
broken in the process.  Anyone know a clean way out of this?  There
seems to be a lot of ambiguity about when a fully qualified name is
needed.  For now I just changed /etc/sys_id back to "biome" and use
/usr/etc/resolv.conf to solve my nameserver problems, but I wonder if
there is any way to use a fully qualified hostname without breaking uucp?
-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
UUCP=..!{uunet|watmath}!dalcs!biome!silvert
BITNET=silvert%biome%dalcs@dalac	InterNet=silvert%biome@cs.dal.ca