Stupid /etc/hosts problems with service principal names

[Richard Sharpe]

Hi folks,

I recently saw a problem with Samba giving out what seemed like the
wrong service principal name in the response to a Negotiate Protocol,
but it came down to Samba trying to convert the hostname (short form)
into an FQDN and name_to_fqdn calls gethostbyname, which, because of
/etc/nsswitch, looks in /etc/hosts, and since we had an entry there
that had not been changed after the domain join, came up with the
wrong FQDN ...

It seems to me that the correct thing here is not to put an entry for
this machine in /etc/hosts (apart from localhost) relating to the
hostname of the member server because it should be using DNS anyway,
and if access to DNS is broken, lots of stuff is not going to work
anyway.

Any comments? Is this stuff that has been discussed before now?

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe
(何以解憂？唯有杜康。--曹操)