FreeBSD Hostname Question - Whats The Proper Way

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

On Aug 30, 2007, at 6:29 PM, L Goodwin wrote:

> Do you mean avoid giving any machines on your LAN the
> same hostname as the (hosted) web server, mail server
> and ftp server? I don't even know what the hostname
> for the web server is. The mail and ftp servers are
> "mail.<domainname>.com" and "ftp.<domainname>.com", so
> I guess I would not want to use these.

I have a minimum of three names for any machine visible to the  
outside world.

(1)  I have the internal name that I give a box.  A few years ago, I  
asked my daughter for help naming machines, and we ended up with a  
Harry Potter theme.  So my primary external server (which has the  
most names) is dobby.ewd.goldmark.org, but that name isn't visible to  
the world.  It's not secret, but I have no intention of having  
anything out side my local network needed to refer to it that way.

(And in the Harry Potter scheme, my three headed firewall is named  
fluffy.)

(2) But there is another name it must also have.  I have a tiny block  
of IP addresses which all had PTR records associated with them like

  static-72-64-118-118.dllstx.fios.verizon.net.

It took more than two hours on the phone to Verizon to get those  
changed, so it was something I only ever wanted to do once, so I have  
names like

    n114.ewd.goldmark.org
    n115.ewd.goldmark.org

and so on.  So dobby is also known of as n118.ewd.goldmark.org

(3) Now dobby runs a couple of public servers.  It runs Apache as  
www.goldmark.org and about half a dozen vhosts.  It also also runs a  
mailserver (postfix) with mailman primarily visible under the name  
lists.shepard-families.org.

So recapping.  One is my quasi-private name for the box itself.  And  
that is what hostname  knows.  Two is a name corresponding the the  
reverse lookup of any public  IP address it might have.  There may be  
several of these if the machine had multiple IP addresses.  And three  
are "role" names for all of the services it runs.  This way, if I  
want to move a service to a different host, that is relatively easy.

-j



-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/