On Mon, 16 Nov 1998 16:50:54 -0600 (CST)  "Tom T. Thai" wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Nov 1998, Thimble Smith wrote:
> 
> > In general I think it's smart for the system administrator to make
> > sure that `hostname` returns a FQDN.  Otherwise you're going to
> 
> I'm not sure if I agree with the fact that `hostname` should return a
> FQDN.  Is there and RFC somewhere I can look at?  I don't mean to start
> any religious OS war, since I would rather focus on using NetBSD and
> MySQL.  I've cc: this to the netbsd's group, maybe they can shed some
> light on how NetBSD uses `hostname` or maybe I didn't config my system
> right.

As I understand it, technically the domainname is the YP/NIS domainname
and the hostname is the DNS hostname.

The way I usually do things is to set the domainname to the DNS
domainname on systems which use NIS/YP (which from a security
point-of-view is probably a no-no) and to use FQDN on systems which
don't.

On either set-up, the line in the /etc/hosts is always:

	IP-ADDRESS	FULL-NAME	SHORT-NAME

This pretty much works for me on NetBSD, Ultrix and Solaris boxes.
YMMV.

Simon.