Thanks for the correction! I new I couldn't reply to a public forum without making one mistake :) -----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Matt Hyclak Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 5:44 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] Re: hostname setting On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 02:20:03PM -0800, Ian Anderson enlightened us: > /etc/sysconfig/network is what assigns the hostname to your particular > server. This is also where CentOS writes the hostname when you initially > install the OS. > > /etc/hosts provides a mechanism for mapping that hostname to an IP > address. This is one of several ways to map ip's to hostnames. > > > I use /etc/sysconfig/network to "name" my machines and then enter that > value into /etc/hosts. i.e. > > /etc/sysconfig/network > HOSTNAME="vpn-gateway" > > /etc/hosts > 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain > 10.0.0.1 vpn-gateway vpn-gateway.mydomain.com > > the second entry is an "alias" to vpn-gateway. If you were to ping > either one you would get a response from 10.0.0.1. > > There is an order of operations that CentOS uses to resolve host names. > By default the first attempt is in the hosts file. If it doesn't find > anything there is will try DNS, if nothing is there it will try WINS, > and so on. If you have a DNS server in your network you could add a > record to resolve vpn-gateway.mydomain.com to 10.0.0.1 and not fill in a > /etc/hosts value at all. (Providing /etc/resolv.conf is setup to look > at that DNS server) > > Someone correct me if I am wrong, but this is what I understand to be > correct. > > Not to pick nits, but according to the hosts manpage, you have your aliases and FQDN's backwards: For each host a single line should be present with the following information: IP_address canonical_hostname aliases And it is /etc/nsswitch.conf that determines the order of search. By default this is files (e.g. /etc/hosts) then dns, and there may be others like ldap or nis depending on how you set up the machine. Matt -- Matt Hyclak Department of Mathematics Department of Social Work Ohio University (740) 593-1263 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos