Re: [osstest test] 60719: tolerable FAIL - PUSHED

[Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@citrix.com>]

On Thu, 2015-09-03 at 11:49 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Ian Campbell writes ("Re: [Xen-devel] [osstest test] 60719: tolerable 
> FAIL - PUSHED"):
> ...
> > I suspect this is down to:
> > 
> >     root@lace-bug    :/etc/libvirt# cat /etc/hosts
> >     127.0.0.1    	    localhost
> >     127.0.1.1    	    lace-bug.xs.citrite.net    	   
> >  lace-bug
> 
> This is simply wrong.  It means that when programs on the host try to
> find the host's own IP address starting with its host name, they get
> different (and wrong) answers to programs on other hosts.
> 
> I can see why D-I wants to do this but in our setup it is simply
> entirely wrong.  Is there a way to suppress this (from preseed
> maybe) ?

The responsible component in d-i is netcfg and when it has been told (e.g.
via preseed) to use dhcp it will do as above, with no option to do
otherwise (it _might_ be possible to omit FQDN by not giving the domains
name in preseed, I can't quite figure that out without trying).

If instead preseed is changed to use a static address then it will write
the given static address instead.

So we could change osstest to use static addresses at preseed time,
although that would be problematic if the host was actually dynamic. Also
it seems like we explicitly stopped doing this in:
    commit 28bc2c8875c30209c2f189ba4d87fc401bb78cf6
    Author: Ian Jackson <    iwj@woking.uk.xensource.com    >
    Date:   Thu Aug 18 01:23:40 2011 +0100

        OsstestDebian: use dhcp for installation again (avoids reference to NetNetmask and NetGateway)

We could rewrite /etc/hosts in ts-xen-install (around the time we frob
/etc/network/interfaces) to remove the 127.0.1.1 altogether, meaning that
lookups of a hosts own FQDN would be resolved by DNS instead. THis would be
OK even if we stop switching /e/n/i from DHCP to static too.

Ian.