Stupid /etc/hosts problems with service principal names

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 10:02:41AM -0700, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> 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?

Sounds like a broken setup to me. And yeah, we shouldn't be
doing anything inside /etc/hosts.

Jeremy.