Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-features (193 mails)

[fate_noreply@xxxxxxx]

Feature added by: Katarina Machalkova (kmachalkova)

Feature #308824, revision 1
Title: Drop appending 127.0.0.2 line to /etc/hosts (incl. related configuration 
options) 
  
openSUSE-11.3: New
Priority 
    Requester: Important 
 
Requested by: Katarina Machalkova (kmachalkova) 
 
Description: 
For years, SUSE-based products have been appending '127.0.0.2 host.domain host' 
to /etc/hosts as a convenience for applications which want to resolve the 
hostname and which thus become irresponsive without active network [1]

Localhost IP associated with FQDN however causes various network services 
(samba, SLP, LDAP, ntp, ... ) to behave oddly [2]. An option in product-wide 
control files has been introduced so as not to append 127.0.0.2 on 
server-oriented products (SLES) - FaTE#303875, while keeping user the 
possibility to override the default in GUI and AutoYaST profile. Nevertheless, 
even reasonably set default doesn't prevent misconfigurations and user 
complaints [3]

The suggestion is therefore to drop 127.0.0.2 modification of /etc/hosts 
altogether and drop GUI/control options associated with configuration thereof. 
These include:


* GUI option in YaST installer
* XML profile elements in AutoYaST
* Variable in product-wide control file (control.xml)
* Possibly also sysconfig variable


Appending 127.0.0.2 line has always been sort of workaround for flawed (mostly) 
desktop applications and DNS servers, so rather than providing workaround with 
plethora of side effects, it'd more reasonable to have affected apps fixed. 
Bugs have been filed against some of them and fixed already. 
 
References:
[1] Apps become slow when offline bugs

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=304632 
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=383336

[2] Network services going insane with localhost IP associated with FQDN

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=207392 
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=355608 
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=570108

[3] Even reasonably set default doesn't help

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=510228 
 
-- 
openSUSE Feature: 
https://features.opensuse.org/308824