Timo Röhling <[email protected]> writes: > Hi Richard, > > * Richard Lewis <[email protected]> [2025-10-18 * > 15:53]: >>I think the missing bit of explanation in this thread is: why would >>anyone know "apollo" but not "appollo.example.com"? both of these >>strings are written by the admin in /etc/hosts which is a file that has >>probably never been changed (and probably doesnt tell you anything much >>about reaching the system externally)
> AFAIK the name is treated as an opaque string, so while Tradition > tells you to set the unqualified hostname, there is no technical > reason why you cannot set the fully qualified "apollo.example.com" as > hostname. And some people do that; I guess it is one of the > contradicting traditions Simon talked about elsethread. > >>ie - what is the actual problem these settings are trying to solve? > A lot of software assumes that it can always resolve the local > hostname to an IP address (and vice versa look up the associated > hostname of an assigned IP address). That remains true even if you set > the hostname fully-qualified, so unless you have a permanent, reliable > connection to a DNS server that serves your domain, you probably want > the /etc/hosts entry; otherwise you may encounter random timeouts > while interacting with network daemons on your host. This was really helpul, thanks - ive edited marc's wiki page https://wiki.debian.org/Hostname to try and explain this
