On Fri 27 Oct 2023 at 07:12:48 (-0400), gene heskett wrote: > On 10/27/23 00:47, Stefan Monnier wrote: > > > I would have thought that techies understand its origins, and > > > non-techies are fairly unlikely ever to encounter it. > > > > That's the thing: if you use `home.arpa` for your home network, suddenly > > it's exposed to non-techies, like your friends and family, contrary to > > things like `in-addr.arpa`.
You'll have to remind me where it is that your non-techie friends and family would see your domain name. As I start to compose this email, the only occurrence on the screen is in the quote above, and that goes for the other 19 virtual desktops (fvwm-parlance) as well. It's not as if you actually need a domain name—a non-techie home network will run perfectly well without one. > I tried to change just this machine to see how its done, and managed > to get all the right answers, which did not affect my local network > since I generally use the alias name for an ssh or sshfs login, but on > a reboot its all gone. So how the heck do we do that so it survives a > reboot? My domain name is corp, chosen to make the next step easier. # grep -r '\<corp\>' /etc/ |& less will show the configured occurrences. (Run this as a user and the & will show what missed being searched.) Here, the files hit are: /etc/hosts, /etc/aliases, /etc/mailname, /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and /etc/exim4/hubbed_hosts. The last one is for my intra-LAN emails in the absence of any DNS service on my router(s). If you're setting up tunnels and things like that, there may be more occurrences. Then you need to check at least /var/lib in the same manner, which may remind you to rerun some configuration scripts. The obvious one above is dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config in order to rewrite /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated. Changing just one machine's domain name on a network may not make a lot of sense if other machines refer to it. BTW I have no idea why this thread has suddenly lurched onto hostnames (he writes, as he looks up at the Subject line). Cheers, David.
