In hostnamed this is exposed as a dbus property, and in the logs in both
places.
This is of interest to network management software and such: if the fallback
hostname is used, it's not as useful as the real configured thing. Right now
various programs try to guess the source of hostname by looking at the string.
E.g. "localhost" is assumed to be not the real hostname, but "fedora" is. Any
such attempts are bound to fail, because we cannot distinguish "fedora" (a
fallback value set by a distro), from "fedora" (received from reverse dns),
from "fedora" read from /etc/hostname.
/run/systemd/fallback-hostname is written with the fallback hostname when
either pid1 or hostnamed sets the kernel hostname to the fallback value. Why
remember the fallback value and not the transient hostname in /run/hostname
instead?
We have three hostname types: "static", "transient", fallback".
– Distinguishing "static" is easy: the hostname that is set matches what
is in /etc/hostname.
– Distingiushing "transient" and "fallback" is not easy. And the
"transient" hostname may be set outside of pid1+hostnamed. In particular,
it may be set by container manager, some non-systemd tool in the initramfs,
or even by a direct call. All those mechanisms count as "transient". Trying
to get those cases to write /run/hostname is futile. It is much easier to
isolate the "fallback" case which is mostly under our control.
And since the file is only used as a flag to mark the hostname as fallback,
it can be hidden inside of our /run/systemd directory.
For https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1892235.
The semantics were significantly changed in c779a44222
("hostnamed: Fix the way that static and transient host names interact", Feb. 2014),
but when the dbus api documentation was imported much later, it wasn't properly
adjusted to describe those new semantics.
34293dfafd which added systemd.hostname= also
added new behaviour.
Let's ove various bits and pieces around so that they are in more appropriate
places. Drop recommendations to set the hostname for DHCP or mDNS purposes.
Nowadays we expect tools that want to expose some different hostname to the
outside to manage that internally without affecting visible state. Also drop
mentions of DHCP or mDNS directly setting the hostname, since nowadays network
management software is expected to (and does) go through hostnamed.
Also, add a high-level description of semantics. It glosses over the details of
handling of localhost-style names. Later commits will remove this special handling
anyway.
This has the advantage that the executables are always in place and we don't
need any units to exist on the bus, so we can eventually hook this up into
a normal build system. (Probably as a build time check.)
Follow-up for f92c8d1c67.
directives.index:
- This index contains 3398 entries in 19 sections, referring to 333 individual
+ This index contains 4316 entries in 19 sections, referring to 333 individual
This replaces the api export tables with updated versions, and inserts
comments for all "undocumented" items. The slow work of documented them
is left for later ;)
lxml does some formatting changes that are not significant for lxml processing,
but generate spurious difference in the diff (namely: ulinks become one-line,
and double quotes are used instead of single quotes for element attribute
values). This should be a one-time thing: subsequent renegeration should be
idempotent with regards to this.
Yu Watanabe