[sles-beta] SLES12B9 - hostname being reset to "linux" on zypper dup

[Josef Reidinger]

On Mon, 23 Jun 2014 15:27:15 +0200
"Olaf Hering" <ohering at suse.de> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 23, Darren Thompson wrote:
> 
> > Caused a little fun and games with my SLES12 cluster before I
> > realised that everything was named "linux" ;-)
> 
> Looks like systemd is not well integrated into SUSE Linux. Since many
> years /etc/HOSTNAME was the config file for the hostname. With Beta9
> that file became /etc/hostname, owned by systemd. Tthe old file was
> changed to a symlink. It should have been the other way around,
> /etc/hostname should be a symlink to /etc/HOSTNAME.
> I hope that change was not a mindless "do what upstream does"
> change... At least its not mentioned in the release-notes.
> 
> Olaf

Reason is that other distros(debian, ubuntu, RH, mentioned also in
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Host-Identification.html
in function sethostname) use /etc/hostname and there is no good reason
to be different in this case. I think this is good step, as we should
not diverge from upstream and other distribution unless it provides us
advantage over others that pays increased cost of maintaining such
difference.

Josef