dhcp evils

[Paul Howarth]

On Sat, 2005-04-16 at 23:25 -0500, Michael Hennebry wrote:
> On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Brian Truter wrote:
> 
> > On 4/16/05, Michael Hennebry <hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> wrote:
> > > Recently my computer seems to have had
> > > a name transplant.
> > > When things I working right, it thinks
> > > its name is a combination of its IP
> > > address and cableone.
> > > The current name, the output of hostname,
> > > is one that I'd previously only seen when I'd
> > > booted a kernel that wouldn't talk my
> > > ethernet card.
> 
> >
> > You will find the logs in /var/log
> >
> > Your DHCP client messages would be in /var/log/messages
> 
> Thanks.  I had looked there before, but that was before I
> knew to look for dhclient instead of dhcp.
> 
> Alas it didn't solve the mystery, to wit,
> where is stmike coming from?  I suspect that I
> will never solve the mystery of where it came
> from originally, but I would dearly like to
> know where it is being stored.
> What I don't want to do is just find a way
> to force the hostname to be something else.
> That wouldn't tell me what is going on.
> 
> I'm pretty sure my setup is supposed to get the
> hostname through through dhcp.  That is the way
> it worked when I first managed to connect it
> to the internet.
> 
> Ideas anyone?

DHCP gives you an IP address, not a hostname. The hostname then comes
from doing a reverse lookup of the IP address (usually using DNS, but in
some environments this might be a hosts file, NIS etc.).

Paul.
-- 
Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org>