Problem setting up wired networking

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 10:26:44AM -0800, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-11-12 at 11:10 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> > And how that is supposed to happen without a reboot if renames occur
> > only if a name was 'localhost' or 'locahost.localdomain' and only
> > the first time an interface was going up after a reboot?
> 
> The problem was that your initial hostname would get set to something
> like dhcp49.homelan.blah and it would resolve out to 192.168.10.49 or
> some such.

OK.  Let's say.

> Then you'd to go a coffee shop and you'd have a problem.

And that problem is?  How this is different if you would always set
a name of that machine to jesse.keating.box?  Nowhere says that what
is returned by 'hostname' needs really be the same what a name
resolution will return.  Moreover machines very often have multiple
names, even with a single network interface, although 'hostname'
will show the only one.

> Either your hostname would have to change, or the hosts entry for what
> it resolved to would have to change, because your address is changing.

Your name to the outside world, are returned by a name resolution,
will change.  That is true.  That does not mean that your machine
has to be known as localhost.localdomain.  

By your arguments it appears that you imagine that a machine with
multiple network interfaces is an instant disaster.  Surprise!
There are many like that around.

> And if that previous address is still resolvable via dns (think vpn
> access back to the home) you're now overriding dns which is wrong.

You do not have "that previous address" now.  You kept a displayed
name.  This is how it works with currently existing laptops for
years and years.  If you called it jesse.keating.box then this is
how it will look from a prompt does not matter where you will go
with it.

> The work around I had was to set hostname up once, resolve it to
> 127.0.0.1 and call it a day.

You are missing the point.  This is not an issue for a laptop or
if you have two boxes around.  That is a great headache if you are
launching few hundreds clients on a network and they are not going
anywhere, because they are part of a big lab or nodes in a cluster,
and all report that they are called 'localhost.localdomain'.  And
no - pre-assigning fixed names is not feasible or desirable.  If you
do not want to see a name of your machine to "float" then you just
assign one to it from the very beginning.  It is that simple.

   Michal