Comment 5 for bug 890501

On Tue, 15 Nov 2011, Eric Hammond wrote:

> Scott: Your suggested approach works for me even though I can't find any
> documentation on how this is supposed to work. Everything I read says
> that 127.0.1.1 should be the canonical hostname of the instance. Do you
> happen to have any pointers to the information you are alluding to with
> IPv6 and 127.0.1.2?

No.
   I actually tried just adding a 127.0.1.1 at the top, and cloud-init
still found it (i was hoping that it would only update the one preceeded
by it's comment, which would have been nicer). I tried that, it didn't
work.
   I don't think this should be "invalid" as I do think we've made things
a bit worse. We were addressing the issue that we saw on openstack where
the ec2metadata's local-hostname did not have a domain portion (bug
854614).

   Some other fallout of this change has been in services that try to bind
to the response to `hostname -f`. The service will then end up binding to
localhost only and not be available on a real address. Mark Mimms has
raised this issue, but I'm not certain which services in particular, and
I don't think that is a great solution itself, and those services would
have issues with the mechanism that you're using above for /etc/hosts, but
previously we were not writing a fqdn to /etc/hosts, which would allow a
dns-lookup to get the local-ipv4 address.

   I'll talk with some of the people on the foundations team and see if we
can't come up with a final solution for this. I really should have done
some more research before putting this in. Hopefully we can get it right
for 12.04, and possibly SRU for 11.10.