Comment 12 for bug 8980

I think I understand this better now... I built a new server today and running the same script I get:

Python 2.4.3 (#2, Apr 27 2006, 14:43:58)
[GCC 4.0.3 (Ubuntu 4.0.3-1ubuntu5)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import socket
>>> print socket.getfqdn()
mailout02.controlledmail.com

or to get back to the original report:

$ hostname -f
mailout02.controlledmail.com

As you can see, it works just fine. The difference (this is the first time out of 4 machines, all Dapper fresh installs all using the text mode installer) I believe is that this time I had the reverse DNS PTR record set in advance. When setting up networking the installer offered mailout02 as the hostname and then clearly picked up the rest of the FQDN from the IP address' PTR record.

It seems to me now that the error is to only ask for the machine's name and not the domain name if it can't be picked up from a PTR record.