I expect that Objections will be heard within the community
This post is structured as follows;
- History of HOSTNAME
- History of the "hostname - ROX - "Puppy-Linux filesystem" problem
- Current status
- The Problem
- Request for community assistance
Without boring anyone, I wll summarize. Since the middle '70, ALL communications and later LAN administrators have been taught that they will never be two devices on the LAN with
- same MAC
- same hostname
- same IP address
These items, it is taught, is a standard that we are suppose to abhere to. And there are many very, very good reasons this is done. The standard says, "Every device will have a unique one of each of these."
Puppy/WARY have long been approaching the LAN as if it is the ONLY PC on the LAN, and that the Puppy PC will use its NIC to traverse the LAN to enter and use the internet.
Over the years, many of us have sort and used PUPs on our LAN where there are other PCs. Most recently, now, many of us are beginning to populate our LANs with multiple PUPs.
Even though the MAC are unique, the hostname(s) are NOT UNIQUE. And, in many cases they are the same for multiple Puppy devices on you LAN. This defies architectural standards defined and causes issues on the local PC and local LAN. Many non-PUP distros handle effectively.handled this problem with the hostname management withn their distros; namely Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, etc.
In Puppy, this appears, that it was never revisited until fall,2010 when Shinobar step forward and began offering a solution that has been adopted by several distro developers here for other reasons, than the one we are discussing here.
History of the " 'hostname' - 'ROX' - 'Puppy-Linux filesystem' " problem
Almost simultaneous with Shinobar's solution, a discovery was made that there was a "LINK" to the /etc/hosts file contents and the behavior of the Puppy filesystem when using ROX. Seems that there is a slowness/delay in ROX behavior on the desktop when this file is NOT set properly. Again, Shinobar, enters the arena and upgrades his tool to overcome this delay problem by insuring that the hostname and the /etc/hosts contains the proper information which removes the delay/slowness we all had had for years with Puppy and ROX.
Now, as nice of a solution that Shinobar presents with the tool he developed for this community, if a savvy Linux user(s) did NOT use his tool, and tried to manually makes some needed changes to the system by modifying some key files or system variables, he runs the risk of filesystem things not working properly.
Current status
Today, no Puppy I have found is delivered with tools necessary to change "ALL" related system variables when the hostname is changed in the system. Nor, is there any directions for addressing how to get hte system to conform so that filesystem performance matches what an OTB filesystem provides in its ROX speed and performance.
The Problem:
In any Puppy system, the following PUPPY System data does NOT agree
when ANY changes to the following is necessary
- hostname from the Linux hostname command
- Linux Environment Variable HOSTNAME
- files
- /etc/hosts
- /etc/hostname
This is system data. And from time to time various application rely on getting authoritative data from the system's files and variables. This information should and must be kept consistent.
- All of these system items should agree when a user begins to use the Puppy desktop and wants to use his machine for ANY LAN operation
- All of these items should agree when a user has a need to change the system's hostname for ANY reason.
It seems that when the fields agree, for some unknown reasons, ROX in PUPs seems to have superior performance than when these fields do NOT agree.
Request for community assistance
Would anyone, anyone share any thoughts on
- why this dilemma exist in Puppy design?
- what would be the "right" place for a solution to be for distro builders?
- What should the solution look like?
- What should be an acceptable Puppy methodolgy for changing the system hostname
- when its necessary to do so?
Please help all of us on this if you can.
P.S. PLEASE understand that the hostname may need to be changed when there is need after the system may have been running for awhile. We should expect that the system administrator can/will at any time change the system hostname to match LAN needs.