Lo, on Tuesday, November 13, Williasm Dowling did write:
^
Minor nit, but it looks like you've got a typo in your MUA configuration.
> I am having trouble installing exim; when it fails it says:
> hostname: Unknown host
> hostname --fqdn gave non-zero exit code 256
>
> I do not have a registered domain name; I suppose I need to set something
> fake like home.net.
You could use your ISP's domain, but it tends to work better if you use a
fake domain, like home.net or home.wxd or whatever.
[Reformatted for 72 columns]
> The man page for hostname says I can query but not set the domainname,
> and suggests using /etc/hosts and/or /etc/host.conf, but the man pages
> for those are not quite explicit enough for me to get something to
> work. I am using dhcp (pump, actually) to get an IP, so I can't
> hard-code an IP anywhere. I have tried quite a few combinations in the
> config files w/o luck; hostname --fqdn always fails.
I have a similar situation at work and puzzled through this a while
back. The fix is to edit /etc/hosts, but you're right, this is not
entirely clear from the manpages.
> ====== /etc/hosts =============
> 127.0.0.1 localhost
> # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
> # (added automatically by netbase upgrade)
> ::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
> fe00::0 ip6-localnet
> ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
> ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
> ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
> ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
Since you use DHCP for an address, change the first line to read
127.0.0.1 <FQDN> <HOSTNAME> localhost
where <FQDN> is your fully-qualified domain name (with the fake domain)
and <HOSTNAME> is the machine's hostname, as printed by `uname -n' and
stored in /etc/hostname. In the language of the hosts(5) manpage, the
FQDN is your canonical_hostname, so it has to be the first name after
the IP address; the order of the other names is not significant.
If you had a static IP, you'd put your FQDN and HOSTNAME on the line
with your statically assigned IP instead.
Then, edit /etc/host.conf and /etc/nsswitch.conf to make sure that you
search /etc/hosts for hostnames at some point in the process. Usually,
you want it to search there first, but this is probably not necessary.
That should get you going.
HTH,
Richard
