Status of Bugzilla #1153

[Simon Vallet]

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:10:21 -0500
Carson Gaspar <carson at taltos.org> wrote:
>
> --On Tuesday, February 21, 2006 11:03 AM +0100 Simon Vallet 
> <svallet at genoscope.cns.fr> wrote:
> 
> > OK -- we have globally the following setup here : an external ssh
> > gateway performing X11 forwarding to the internal network -- as this
> > machine is multihomed, a call to gethostname() returns (correctly IMO)
> > the short name of the gateway, which is the value used to set DISPLAY
> > and to add xauth credentials.
> 
> No. gethostname() needs to return the (or a) FQDN of the server. Anything 
> else is just broken and begging for trouble. This is sysadmin 101.

This is not in any way included in any standard, and I personally
think that it was a reasonable choice. However, even if this is a
debatable topic, it totally misses the point : even when gethostname()
returns an FQDN, there is no way to tell in advance if the returned
value will fit wanted ("working") usage. 

And actually, arbitrarily (from an OpenSSH POV) choosing an
interface/hostname to use in DISPLAY regardless of the interface the
SSH traffic is coming from seems just as "broken" and "begging for
trouble".

Simon