INN and docker default hostnames

[Grant Taylor]

On 4/4/20 10:24 AM, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> In a Docker container, the hostname starts off as a random string like 
> this:
> 
>    root at e5f1e5a358ac:/# uname -n
>    e5f1e5a358ac
> 
> This is a perfectly cromulent hostname for the container:

I agree with your statement, but I dislike the unqualified hostname as 
is.  The lack of qualification will end up causing problems, possibly 
like you're experiencing now.

> However, INN hates it, and refuses to even install:

I seriously question if the failure is in INN itself or the Debian 
package manager.

I bet that innconfval is working exactly like it should and that 
something is not liking what innconfval is returning.

> In many contexts this can be fixed in inn.conf, but not for the specific 
> case of package installation, since a suitable inn.conf doesn't exist yet.

Yet another reason to suspect the package manager vs INN itself.

> I think this is a bug in INN.

I'm not convinced that this is a bug in INN.  In fact, I think this is a 
bug in the installer / script that it's using.

> The relevant code is inn_getfqdn(), which asks getaddrinfo() to 
> canonicalize the hostname but then for some reason not only refuses 
> to believe the answer, but also refuses to run even basic tools 
> like innconfval.

I suspect it's something outside of INN that's not liking what it's seeing.

> My suggestion is that INN should believe getaddrinfo(), i.e. remove the 
> strchr() check for '.'.

Names without a period in them are unqualified (in the DNS world).

INN "SHOULD" (in the RFC sense of the word) have a FQDN to work with. 
Much like email servers SHOULD have an FQDN.

I question if you would have any problems installing INN from source vs 
the Debian package.

I also suspect that you could tweak (read: correct the qualification) of 
the container's hostname and that INN would install perfectly fine.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die

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