On 3/10/21 6:27 AM, Mark Knecht wrote:
Caveat - not an expert, just my meager understanding:
1) The name 'localhost' is historically for developers who want to
access their own machine _without_ using DNS.
Eh....
Using the /name/ "localhost" still uses name resolution. It could use
DNS or it may not. It /typically/ means the /etc/hosts file. But it
could mean DNS or NIS(+) or LDAP or something more esoteric.
IMHO what's special about the "localhost" name in particular is that
it's an agnostic / anycast method to say the local host that a given
program is running on without regard to what the actual host name is.
2) By general practice sometime in the deep, dark times 127.0.0.1 was
accepted for this purpose. There's nothing special about the address.
Deep, dark times? It's still used every single day across multiple
platforms, Linux, Unix, Windows, z/OS, i/OS, you name it.
3) I read the original quoted comment in the Kerberos Guide as a warning
- 'to make matters worse, __SOME__"
What did the warning mean to you? Because I took it as "be careful,
your $OS /may/ do this incorrectly". Where "this" is putting the FQDN
on the same line as 127.0.0.1 and / or ::1.
4) In my /etc/hosts I do _NOT_ map my machine's name to the same address
as localhost, avoiding the Kerberos warning:
ACK
I'm grateful for corroboration, but unfortunately that doesn't speak to
why the Gentoo handbook suggests what it does.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
