An odd DNS conundrum?

[john.abreau at zuken.com (John Abreau)]

Don Levey wrote:
> I've got a machine here at work running Fedora Core 2.  Now, while I'm
> turning blue waiting for the opportunity to upgrade the hardware/OS I've run
> into a strange DNS self-identification problem.
> 
> Normally, I expect 'hostname' to return the FQDN of the machine
> (machine1.example.com), and 'hostname -s' to return just the short name
> (machine1).  It works like that on all my other machines of various
> vintages.  However, in this case, 'hostname' also returns just the short
> name, and this is causing some problems for things which are tied to the
> full machine name.

This sounds like an issue with /etc/hosts. If I recall correctly, the
system's notion of the hostname is based on the first name in /etc/hosts
corresponding to its ip address. So if /etc/hosts says

     192.168.1.10     foo foo.bar.com

then the hostname is "foo", whereas if /etc/hosts says

     192.168.1.10     foo.bar.com foo

then the hostname is "foo.bar.com".


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John Abreau
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