On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 5:56 PM, Andrew Pollock <apoll...@debian.org> wrote:
> 4.2.2-2 is going to stop requesting the host-name option by default. I > don't > feel that dhclient-script should be making implicit assumptions by looking > at the state of the system, it should only do what it is explicitly > configured to do, i.e. if the host-name option is requested, it should set > the host-name. Since this behaviour (by default) is clearly surprising > people (and causing problems), I'm changing it to not be the default > behaviour. > > I'll have to review the situation in Squeeze. > Andrew, Thanks for the information about how it'll be implemented moving forward. Not to shy too far off-topic, I'm just trying to explain my use case for this. I work for a pretty well known cloud services provider. We create distribution templates for Debian as well as others. Most other distributions look at the state of the system to determine whether the hostname should be set by DHCP. I've yet to find a use case where this mechanism is wrong. We have our DHCP servers set the hostname by default so the system gets an initial hostname and is ready to go. Every other distribution checks the state of the system to determine if the hostname should be set. If the hostname setting is blank/empty they will set the hostname as obtained by DHCP. Otherwise, it sets the configured hostname. I believe the behavior of it not even checking if the hostname should be set or not is surprising people as it had not forced it before (as far as I am aware). This bug was opened because dhclient wasn't setting the hostname when it should. I'm not a huge fan of using it on servers, but the patch I submitted earlier was based on an idea I obtained from the way Ubuntu handles this. It checks to see if the /etc/hostname file contains any data. If the length of the file is zero, it sets the dhcp hostname. Otherwise, if it has data, it sets that instead. This provides a more uniform behavior across distributions. I definitely understand your insight on the changes you feel should be made. I agree that by default it should not request host-name, but I still think the dhclient-script should contain the logic to check to whether it should set the hostname or not when it does request it. Thanks for getting it to set the hostname again in 4.2.2-1. I hope you'll consider my feedback about the path that will be taken moving forward. -Tim
