For as long as I can recall, Fedora has shipped with a default hostname of "localhost.localdomain"[1]. This default was "safe" for a very long time because we also shipped an /etc/hosts entry that routed this hostname to the loopback device for the benefit of some older system services (like sendmail).
However, having the default be the same on all systems introduces other problems, notably with regards to acting as a client to FreeIPA or Active Directory domain controllers. When enrolling with one of these DCs, the machine's current hostname (up to the first dot) is used to uniquely identify the machine into the domain. If the machine's hostname is not unique in that domain, the enrollment will either fail or the machine will take over that name (depending on the server-side implementation). Neither case is likely to be what the user intended. Some information on competing platforms: Windows deals with this on for its systems by assigning all new machines a random hostname of the form WIN-XXXXXXXXXXX (that's a strict count of 11 random characters of either capital letters or decimal numerals after the WIN- prefix). This is because there is a 15-character maximum limit on the machine-name in Active Directory, after which it is simply truncated (which is a bad behavior, but one we have to deal with). Mac OS X and Ubuntu both require the user to pick a machine name at install time explicitly. They do not autogenerate one at all. SUSE generates a random name of the format linux-XXXXXX (I'm not sure how many random characters). My proposal is that we should consider changing the default hostname for Fedora 26 to be either FED-XXXXXXXXXXX or FEDORA-XXXXXXXX. The former allows for a longer random string and therefore lower risk of collision in large environments, while the latter would also provide improved branding for Fedora[2]. Our default BASH shell prompt includes the current machine's hostname. Thoughts on how to generate these random strings are of course up for discussion. Given that initial machine creation may have limited available entropy, we may want to avoid just calling out to /dev/random. Dusty Mabe suggested in on IRC that one option might be to use either the first or last 8/11 characters from /etc/machine-id, since presumably those would be sufficiently random. [1] Unless there is a DHCP-assigned hostname, in which case it will use that. [2] There is an ongoing discussion on the desktop@ list about how to subtly brand the Workstation Edition such that when people are using it or showing it to others, it is clear that it is *Fedora* as opposed to any other GNOME distribution.
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
