[LUGSB] GNOME desktop weirdness

[Michael Graffam]

On Mon, 15 Mar 2004, Vinay Pai wrote:

> > My /etc/hosts contains the standard localhost entry for 127.0.0.1.
> > Shouldn't all local programs address the X server by this name?  No
> > matter what network I am on, this does not change.
>
> The whole point of network transparancy is that a program doesn't know
> that its "local". It will identify itself as whatever gethostname()
> returns.

This is 100% accurate.

> To be honest, I'm still not sure why you've got a hostname assigned by
> DHCP.  Why should the name of your computer change depending on where
> you're plugged it?  Isn't it easier to just have a static hostname and let
> DHCP assign you the IP address, nameservers, DNS suffix etc.

It is true that this is somewhat redundant and even troublesome, but
there are some reasons to do it, namely that of tracking users.

In any case, this entire problem can be dissolved by doing the following:

Get a permanent hostname from No-ip.com .. modify /etc/hosts so that
gethostname() returns this hostname as registered with No-ip.com.
Then simply modify the network connection scripts to update the No-ip.com
nameservers whenever your IP changes.