ec2-images have ubuntu.canonical.com in /etc/hosts

[Scott Moser]

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bug 407861 brought up this issue, but we never opened another bug to
address it.

The following is present on an ec2-image out of the box:
$ grep 127. /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 ubuntu.canonical.com ubuntu

 affects ubuntu/vm-builder
 tag ec2-images uec-images
 status confirmed
 importance medium
 subscribe Eric Hammond
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[Scott Moser (smoser)]

I really don't feel like fixing this correctly in vmbuilder at the moment. Doing so I think would be to either:
a.) add a '--no-local-host-entry' like field
b.) allow '--host' to be 'null' or 'unset' special case. On that, the 127.0.1.1 entry would not be written.

Neither of those are trivial. The reason for this is that the values populated into /etc/hosts come from the '--hostname' and '--domain' arguments. --hostname (vm.hostname) is used:

$ grep vm.hostname -r * -l
VMBuilder/plugins/libvirt/__init__.py
VMBuilder/plugins/ubuntu/dapper.py
VMBuilder/plugins/virtualbox/vm.py
VMBuilder/plugins/vmware/vm.py

So, I'm planning on removing the 127.0.1.1 entry in a '--execscript' script that will be pasted from build-ec2-image

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

This is fixed in automated ec2 builds . The 20091013.1 build (http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/karmic/20091013.1) should have it, as well as all subsequent builds.

[Eric Hammond (esh)]

Scott: Since you're solving this with an exec script, could you also remove the incorrect /etc/hostname file while you're at it?

Even though I haven't found any standard packages which depend on /etc/hostname it still bugs me to have an incorrect value stored there by default.

[Scott Moser (smoser)]

I'd really prefer to just leave /etc/hostname as it is right now. We don't have any known issues with having that, and as Soren said in Comment 1 for bug 407861 it makes some things easier.

I think this is probably the same situation that many desktop systems have. When you do the install, it asks you for a hostname. You enter one, and then you get an IP address from some router-gateway system, that doesn't necessarily match up with what you entered.