[Mailman-Users] DEFAULT_HOSTNAME? (fwd)

[Greg Ward]

On 25 September 2001, eric-mailman at pretorious.net said:
> <sarcasm>Given the overwhelmingly thorough documentation that comes with
> Mailman, I can't imagine why anyone would experiment with anything that
> remotely resembles a glimpse of hope but isn't referenced in the
> documentation.</sarcasm>

I can sympathize.  I don't like underdocumented software either.

> So do you have any answers? Or just bullets to shoot holes in my [futile]
> attempts to get Mailman to function logically?

No, sorry, I should have mentioned I didn't have any useful ideas -- I
just know that using cross-compilation options won't have much effect.

One possibility is to see what the system resolver thinks your hostname
is.  Try this:

  $ python
  Python 2.1 (#2, May  8 2001, 10:50:59) 
  [GCC 2.95.2 20000220 (Debian GNU/Linux)] on linux2
  Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  >>> from socket import *
  >>> gethostname()
  'cthulhu'
  >>> gethostbyname("cthulhu")
  '127.0.0.1'
  >>> gethostbyname_ex("cthulhu")
  ('cthulhu', ['localhost'], ['127.0.0.1'])

On my system, this is all determined by /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts:

  $ cat /etc/hostname 
  cthulhu
  $ head -1 /etc/hosts
  127.0.0.1       cthulhu localhost

(NB. gethostbyname_ex() returns the canonical hostname, a list of
aliases, and a list of IP addresses.)

You might also want to see what the kernel thinks the hostname is:

  >>> os.uname()[1]
  'cthulhu'

One thing that *might* work is to add your FQDN to /etc/hosts, so the
resolver in libc (which is what Python's socket.gethost*() functions
use) knows about it.

        Greg