brainstorming for UDS-N - Performance: Have a valid hostname

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday, September 28, 2010 04:11:16 pm Allison Randal wrote:
> The Performance track is about measurable speed improvements and also
> about snappy, responsive user experience, across all editions of Ubuntu,
> from older hardware to high-efficiency devices, and from boot experience
> through common user-facing applications and tools.
> 
> What's high on your list for this area?
> Allison

This isn't strictly about performance, but about correctness.  I didn't see a 
better place, so I thought I'd try it in the category and see.

We do not do a very good job of making sure that systems have a valid 
hostname.  Many email related tools depend on having a valid hostname.  I see 
bugs all the time for Postfix and Amavisd-new (the most recent of which was 
today, thus I'm motivated to write this) that aren't package bugs, but invalid 
system hostname settings.  This has been going on long enough that there is a 
5 digit bug about the problem that's still open and our amavisd-new package 
has a patch specifically added to make it clearer how to work around this 
problem.

I'd like to see us review the ways that hostname gets set during install and 
on boot for desktop and server and for DHCP and static assignment and have 
clear documentation on how this is supposed to work so we can identify all the 
current deficiencies and get them fixed.

Scott K