hostnames and interfaces

[Luke Kearney]

On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 20:42:33 -0500
Marty Landman <MLandman at face2interface.com> granted us these pearls of wisdom:

> At 08:17 PM 11/20/2003, paul van den bergen wrote:
> 
> >to expand on this, there is a potential many to many relationship here 
> >between
> >host names and IP addresses (strickly speaking that is what dns etc sees?)
> >
> >how dose BSD define this? how does one define this using BSD?
> 
> Hey, sounds like you understand things so well you see the void in the 
> forest. As a newbie I'm still just trying to keep my head from twisting off 
> at long enough intervals to define some of the questions. Like, given I 
> have 5 boxes - 1 fbsd 4 windoz though maybe that proportion will change in 
> a time :) - and each has their own ip adr and I have two apaches installed 
> does that mean I can setup a max of 5 different domain level websites on my 
> intranet? Or 10? Or infinite (well, this is reality I hope so...)
> 
> The daemons are afoot, my ponderings do not affect them.

Hi,
Let me see if I can shed some light on this issue for you. To the best
of my knowledge a FBSD system can have only one hostname however it can
have as many aliases as you wish. The setup of aliases is acheived via
DNS rather than assigning hostnames per interface. Where you have
multiple machines you would assign multiple hostnames whether they be
from different domains or not.

$ host mail.meibin.net
mail.meibin.net is a nickname for kyoto.meibin.net
kyoto.meibin.net has address 220.111.132.28

per the above the actual host name for the system is kyoto, it's FQDN is
kyoto.meibin.net and it has the alias of mail.meibin.net rather than the
host name of mail.meibin.net .

Apache and loads of other software support virtual hosting and defining
a name in an apache configuration has little to do with the actual
underlying system hostname. That being said virtual hosts don't work
well if DNS was not set correctly for them. 

HTH

LukeK