Re: [gentoo-user] hostname problem : solved

[Todd Goodman <tsg@bonedaddy.net>]

* Philip Webb <purslow@ca.inter.net> [161003 20:04]:
> 161002 Philip Webb wrote:
> > 161002 Hinnerk van Bruinehsen wrote:
> >> On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 07:41:48AM -0400, Philip Webb wrote:
> >>> I did a big system update yesterday ( 52 pkgs ), incl Net-tools Dhcpcd ,
> >>> & on restarting today found that hostname is not being set :
> >> Check if sys-apps/net-tools has the "hostname" useflag enabled
> >> it's enabled by default so you may encounter the fallout of a -* setup.
> > Yes, that was it (red face).  Thanks for the prompt reply.
> 
> Wanting to make a note for the future in case this happens again,
> I have written :
> 
>   Hostname set by  /etc/init.d/hostname :
>     the binary  /bin/hostname  is provided by Net-tools + USE="hostname" ;
>      hostname  needs to be set to  localhost  to make apps work properly :
>     this is done via  /etc/hosts ,
>      wh belongs to Baselayout & shd contain '127.0.0.1 localhost' ;
>     there is also  /etc/conf.d/hostname ,
>      wh belongs to Openrc & contains 'hostname="localhost"'.
> 
> However, I'm now wondering whether/why the system needs both
>  /etc/hosts  +  /etc/conf.d/hostname , which seem to do the same thing.
> Can anyone explain ? 

I can't speak to why there are multiple ways to do things (just
different ways carried forward I think.)

But recently a change (to OpenRC I believe) requires the line in
/etc/conf.d/hostname to have the environment variable capitalized to be
used.

In your example it needs to contain "HOSTNAME=localhost" and not
"hostname=localhost"

I had one fairly recently installed server run into this problem (and
not my other servers.)

I run ~amd64

Todd