[omniORB] OmniORB on RedHat 7.2

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 11:26:15AM +0900, Ulf Stoermer wrote:
> Dear all,
[snip]
> >This is another frequently encountered problem with recent redhat
> >installations. I don't know if other installations do the same. IMO, it is
> >not how one should configure a networked machine.
> >Redhat always put something like this in your /etc/hosts:
> >   127.0.0.1 foo localhost.localdomain localhost
> >
> >This is ok if yours is a home machine with just a dialup interface.
> >But on a networked machine, if you have that entry and one do a name to
> >address lookup for "foo", what you get is 127.0.0.1. In other words, one
> >cannot find out what the real IP address of your host is.
[snip]
> >The solution is either:
> >1. Remove "foo" from the /etc/hosts, (PREFERRED)
> >2. Start your server with this ORB option:
> >      $./eg2_impl -ORBpoa_iiop_name_port "foo"
> >
> >Regards,
> >Sai-Lai
> 
> The recommended solution nr 1 (remove "foo") actually caused
> my problem. Putting back the localhost entry into the hosts-file
> like it was done by the redhat installation and my problems went
> away.
> Well, I haven't tried any Corba-invocations over the network yet,
> maybe there's more trouble on the way, but I'd say: Don't remove
> that line from your hosts-file.

I think you may have more trouble on the way.  What Sai-Lai recommends
is correct for a networked host in the canonical setup -- ie, with a
permanent IP address, and a hostname that resolves in DNS.  If your
machine's name won't resolve in DNS, then you need to put it in
/etc/hosts if you want it to resolve at all.

So: in the normal networked case, the Redhat Way (tm) is quite broken.
But in the normal dialup case (or on any other machine where "host
`hostname -f`" will fail), the Redhat Way is quite right.  It does mean
that omniORB will by default publish IORs with 127.0.0.1 in them
(rather than your machine's real IP address) so you'll probably need
to do additional work to actually use CORBA over the network.

-- Nathaniel

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