Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!ucbvax!DG-RTP.DG.COM!owen From: owen@DG-RTP.DG.COM (Karl Owen) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Use Domain In Hostname Or Not? Message-ID: <9002230539.AA05961@spectre.rtp.dg.com> Date: 23 Feb 90 05:39:37 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: owen@DG-RTP.DG.COM Organization: Data General, RTP, NC Lines: 37 > From: Steve Simmons > Subject: Re: Use Domain In Hostname Or Not? > To: keith@spider.co.uk (Keith Mitchell) > Date: Thu, 22 Feb 90 12:58:19 EDT > Cc: scs@itivax.iti.org, tcp-ip@nic.ddn.mil, bind@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU > > > scs%itivax%ox.com%umich%mailrus%cs.utexas.edu@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu > > (Steve Simmons) writes: > > > >"... I'm interested in any and all comments on why or why not to set > >hostname to FQDN...." (FQDN = Fully Qualified Domain Name) > . . . > > To summarize the responses to my original item: > > Almost everyone said we should go to FQDNs even though they were not > strictly required; the remainder claimed they were strictly required. > This requires rebuilding our sendmail.cfs :-( our news files :-( our > hosts files :-( our host.equiv files :-( . . . well, you get the idea. I'm not sure that I agree with this. We should be able to live with unqualified names as shortcuts. The burden belongs on the systems implementors, not on the users. For example, a simple library routine can be used to strip most of the clutter from netstat and to allow rshd and rlogind to recognize local parts of domain names. The routine looks up the domain part of the FQDN by doing a gethostbyname() on the result of gethostname(). It can then compare the domain part to the domain part of any FQDN and strip the domain part if appropriate. Karl -- Karl M. Owen owen@dg-rtp.dg.com Data General, RTP, NC ...!mcnc!rti!xyzzy!owen