> It is a very well established convention that words represent what they mean, > and their description is found in a good dictionary. If you change the > meaning of a word, in a dictionary of your own, the rest of the world will > not understand what you say. > > hostname is a very well established word in official industry standards, and > it does not mean "this is where you write the configuration of network > interfaces". Forcing a slang in your tribe just makes you look exactly what > you are: a minority that requires a linguistic overhead and a lot of patience. > > Perhaps your confusion with the names comes from the fact that OpenBSD retains in many areas time-honored and well-known design decisions made by Unix pioneers long ago.
Some times ago if you required to have a unique UUCP node name for your computer it was defined in some way as `myname`. I think that was the reason for OpenBSD's "/etc/myname" filename (and personally I think it's a good idea to store a thing known as myname in a file called myname ;-) ) As time progresses you were required to specify a TCP/IP hostname, too. In general, it was a good idea to keep the hostname synchronized with the nodename. Otherwise there was a risk of confusion. Now some people build "something new" and decided to store myname in a file called /etc/hostname. Others store a string to set the nodename on boot in /etc/rc.conf. Others again have chosen to store the node name in a hierarchical database and call it `ActiveComputerName`... So you can see that you always have to study the documents/manuals of the operating system you are using. Besides the location for this name it is good to know if your operating system requires an FQDN (like OpenBSD or many Linux distributions) or if you need to enter an unadorned hostname (UHN) in /etc/hostname (which Debian and derived distributions require) - but again, you need to study the documents/manuals of the operating system you are using. BTW This is a mailinglist. So please please send your mail to the list only. Please do NOT copy emailadresses in Cc: and/or To: headers. No reason to send multiple duplicates to multiple people around the globe. Thank you!
