Copyright 2005-2008 Lennart Poettering <@PACKAGE_BUGREPORT@>
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
Version 0.2 released. Changes include: Update for IPv6 and newest glibc NSS interfaces
Version 0.1 released. Initial release.
nss-myhostname is a plugin for the GNU Name Service Switch (NSS) functionality of the GNU C Library (glibc) providing host name resolution for the locally configured system hostname as returned by gethostname(2). A lot of software relies on that the local host name is resolvable via DNS to an IPv4 or IPv6 address. When using dynamic hostnames this is usually achieved by patching /etc/hosts which however is suboptimal since it requires a writable /etc file system and is fragile because the file might also be edited by the administrator. nss-myhostname simply returns the IPv4 address 127.0.0.2 (wich is on the local loopback) and the IPv6 address ::1 (which is the local host) for whatever system hostname is configured locally. Patching /etc/hostname is thus no longer necessary.
It works!
After compiling and installing nss-myhostname you'll find a new NSS modules in /lib:
To activate the NSS modules you have to edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and add myhostname to the line starting with "hosts:". On Debian this looks like this:
# /etc/nsswitch.conf passwd: compat group: compat shadow: compat hosts: files dns myhostname networks: files protocols: db files services: db files ethers: db files rpc: db files netgroup: nis
That's it. You should now always be able to resolve your local system hostname. For a quick check use glibc's getent tool:
$ getent ahosts `hostname` ::1 STREAM omega ::1 DGRAM ::1 RAW 127.0.0.2 STREAM 127.0.0.2 DGRAM 127.0.0.2 RAW
In this case the local host name is omega.
It is recommended to put myhostname last in the nsswitch.conf line to make sure that this mapping is only used as fallback, and any DNS or /etc/hosts based mapping takes precedence.
nss-myhostname uses NSS interfaces that are specific to modern glibc's.
nss-myhostname was developed and tested on Fedora 10 from October 2008, it should work on most other Linux distributions since it uses GNU autoconf and GNU libtool for source code configuration and shared library management.
As this package is made with the GNU autotools you should run ./configure inside the distribution directory for configuring the source tree. After that you should run make for compilation and make install (as root) for installation of nss-myhostname.
None so far.
The newest release is always available from @PACKAGE_URL@
The current release is @PACKAGE_VERSION@
Get nss-myhostname's development sources from the GIT repository (gitweb):
git clone git://git.0pointer.de/nss-myhostname