Alon Altman wrote:

Never! There should never be a need to sync two different keys! Continuing
the hostname example, it should be defined in a single place, e.g.
local_machine->network_settings->hostname and all scripts/daemons/apps
that need the value should access it instead of duplicating the data in
their specific config sections! Can you imagine ServerRoot defined more
than once (for the same virtual server) in the Apache config? Wouldn't it
be a nonsense? But the same nonsense is defining server's hostname
separately in sendmail's, httpd's, you name it configuration files.

  Wrong! My host has tens of different hostnames, also a host might have
several IP addresses. Every application needs to know under which hostname
it is working. For example, httpd will show a different page as different
hostnames, and the mail daemon will serve different mailboxes for different
domains.
OK, so the config should be more complicated. E.g. local_machine->network_settings->virtual_hosts[]->hostname. And then apps should refer (probably by id) to a relevant element(s) of the virtual_hosts[] array. See how this is done in fwbuilder - which is a very nice example of proper configuration interface. You define an object once and then refer to it in several places (even for different firewalls), so if e.g. the DMZ mail server for a reason changes its IP, you change it only in the single place.

My point is simple: there should be NO redundant definitions of config parameters relevant for a given object. This rises no objections when the object is an application, but for some reason people start to get nervous when talking about the OS as a whole (or probably even about a domain of computers). When I do "find /etc -exec grep `hostname -s` {} \;" on our workgroup server I get 8 counts, and that's without /var/named and probably a couple of other places. Is it normal?

Regards,

Evgeny


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