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.
We would sometimes ignore localhost-style names in /etc/hostname. That is
brittle. If the user configured some hostname, it's most likely because they
want to use that as the hostname. If they don't want to use such a hostname,
they should just not create the config. Everything becomes simples if we just
use the configured hostname as-is.
This behaviour seems to have been a workaround for Anaconda installer and other
tools writing out /etc/hostname with the default of "localhost.localdomain".
Anaconda PR to stop doing that: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/3040.
That might have been useful as a work-around for other programs misbehaving if
/etc/hostname was not present, but nowadays it's not useful because systemd
mostly controls the hostname and it is perfectly happy without that file.
Apart from making things simpler, this allows users to set a hostname like
"localhost" and have it honoured, if such a whim strikes them.
No functional change, just moving a bunch of things around. Before
we needed a rather complicated setup to test hostname_setup(), because
the code was in src/core/. When things are moved to src/shared/
we can just test it as any function.
The test is still "unsafe" because hostname_setup() may modify the
hostname.
Let's clean up hostname_is_valid() a bit: let's turn the second boolean
argument into a more explanatory flags field, and add a flag that
accepts the special name ".host" as valid. This is useful for the
container logic, where the special hostname ".host" refers to the "root
container", i.e. the host system itself, and can be specified at various
places.
let's also get rid of machine_name_is_valid(). It was just an alias,
which is confusing and even more so now that we have the flags param.
Instead of reading these files at startup and never again, let's read
them when we need them. As an optimization (in particular as some of
these files contain the data for many fields at once) let's cache the
results as long as the stat data (i.e. mtime) remains stable.
Also, while we are at it, if we can't read any of these props, let's not
fail everything, but continue without the data.
There's no point in caching this. Let's always get this directly from
sysfs, so that we can never get out-of-date data here (after all this is
going to be cheap, and people might overmount it or so)
Let's not cache the uname(), it's very cheap to get it, and just means
we might get out of sync with what is current. After all, the data might
change IRL, due to setarch and stuff.
It's not that I think that "hostname" is vastly superior to "host name". Quite
the opposite — the difference is small, and in some context the two-word version
does fit better. But in the tree, there are ~200 occurrences of the first, and
>1600 of the other, and consistent spelling is more important than any particular
spelling choice.
Now that we don't (mis-)use the env file parser to parse kernel command
lines there's no need anymore to override the used newline character
set. Let's hence drop the argument and just "\n\r" always. This nicely
simplifies our code.
These lines are generally out-of-date, incomplete and unnecessary. With
SPDX and git repository much more accurate and fine grained information
about licensing and authorship is available, hence let's drop the
per-file copyright notice. Of course, removing copyright lines of others
is problematic, hence this commit only removes my own lines and leaves
all others untouched. It might be nicer if sooner or later those could
go away too, making git the only and accurate source of authorship
information.
This part of the copyright blurb stems from the GPL use recommendations:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
The concept appears to originate in times where version control was per
file, instead of per tree, and was a way to glue the files together.
Ultimately, we nowadays don't live in that world anymore, and this
information is entirely useless anyway, as people are very welcome to
copy these files into any projects they like, and they shouldn't have to
change bits that are part of our copyright header for that.
hence, let's just get rid of this old cruft, and shorten our codebase a
bit.
Most our other parsing functions do this, let's do this here too,
internally we accept that anyway. Also, the closely related
load_env_file() and load_env_file_pairs() also do this, so let's be
systematic.
Lennart Poettering