Tim wrote:
Allegedly, on or about 21 March 2014, Powell, Michael sent:
The system name or hostname is important to networking; so, I can see why it's under networking, but I believe your frustration is more related to the lack of guidance and quality than anything else.
Well, actually, for a lot of people, the system name is simply what they want to call the computer. The computer may not even be on a network, at all. There's certainly cause for having a process of naming the computer.
For LANs, the hostname may not actually be set on the computer. A DHCP server may dole out IPs and hostnames, or simply dole out hostnames and a DNS lookup discovers what name is given to that IP. In that scenario there's some logic to using the network configuration to fill in the name. Though there's still the reverse case, where I want to name a computer, and let the rest of the network find out what my name is, from me (well, /this/ computer, not actually me, personally).
This is useful in a large site, but also in virtual machines. I have a single VM image which works thus: - set MAC on startup - DHCP returns IP and name from MAC - rc.local uses the name to start services on the VM, dhcp, mail, nntp, dns, pop, etc. - can include dedicated user machine or app, network mounting other partitions as needed.