Should I use bastion in my host/domain name?

[linuxlover]

I am new to freebsd. I am using it on my laptop for personal use (not a server, just personal). I made my first installation a few days ago but it has many problems as I am not much experienced with installation.

I am not sure what should I keep as my host/domain name. I went through:

Hostname on FreeBSD installation

Unlike any previous time I just hit enter when the installer ask for hostname since I'm install it on a VirtualBox VM. This time I decided to give a hostname, blackdog. The installation goes smoothly but after boot up it said "Unqualified hostname" and refused to boot. This made me confused. On...

forums.freebsd.org

Set Hostname

I will be installing FreeBSD for the first time. I was wondering what is the convention for the "Set Hostname" dialog box. The FreeBSD Handbook says, it should be "a hostname that is unique for the network. It should be a fully-qualified hostname, such as machine3.example.com." But in Absolute...

forums.freebsd.org

and similar posts but I am still confused.

Are following okay?
"lenovo.bastion.com" > "username@lenovo.bastion.com"
"lenovo.bastion.local" > "username@lenovo.bastion.local"
"freebsd.lenovo.com" > "username@freebsd.lenovo.com"
"freebsd.lenovo.local" > "username@freebsd.lenovo.com"

 

[SirDice]

I suspect you don't have an actual registered internet domain name? Then steer clear of any registered TLDs and domain names. My home network is named dicelan.home, I have hostnames like molly.dicelan.home and wintermute.dicelan.home. I picked .home as TLD because it doesn't exist. This makes it really easy to separate traffic on my home network and what needs to go to the internet.

Just for a single laptop, no fancy home network, I would just pick <somename>.local. That should work fine. I suck at coming up with hostnames for my home servers, so I pick characters and places from a certain book I like.

 

[ralphbsz]

What SirDice said.

Under no circumstances use lenovo.com or bastion.com, as those are existing domains, and you will cause DNS confusion: What if the real lenovo.com domain has a host named freebsd (I don't know whether it does), and suddenly DNS returns crazy answers for looking up your machine, depending on which DNS server you found first?

I'm going to point out one problem though with using "somename.local": You machine's host name may become the default for example for e-mail addresses or other identifying information. If you are careless about setting up a MUA on your machine, you might end up sending e-mails claiming that your address is for example linuxlover@freebsd.lenovo.com, and that means you will never get an e-mail reply.

 

[linuxlover]

if dicelan.home is okay, then how about freebsd.lenovo.home?

 

[smithi]

My home network is named dicelan.home, I have hostnames like molly.dicelan.home and wintermute.dicelan.home. I picked .home as TLD because it doesn't exist.

Heh, not yet ... house, shop, xxx, pub - just about any word, English anyway, is up for grabs as a TLD these days. Well not for grabs - for sale! Greedy DNS 'real estate agents' have seen to that.

"Nice little DNS system you have there, it would be a shame if comething happened to it."

But I digress ...

 

[VladiBG]

".local" domain is reserved for multicast dns. Other top level domains that are reserved:

.home
.corp
.lan
.intranet
.internal
.private

RFC 2606: Reserved Top Level DNS Names

To reduce the likelihood of conflict and confusion, a few top level domain names are reserved for use in private testing, as examples in documentation, and the like. In addition, a few second level domain names reserved for use as examples are documented. This document specifies an Internet Best...

datatracker.ietf.org

 

[Kai Burghardt]

[…] I picked .home as TLD because it doesn't exist. […]

[…] Greedy DNS 'real estate agents' have seen to that. […]

Registration of home has been rejected multiple times by the ICANN. Nevertheless, in the meantime RFC 8375 proposes use of home.arpa. You really want to use one of the domains that forbid forwarding name resolution requests to a superior name server (which is “outside”).

You know, the great thing about FreeBSD is that you can easily change the hostname at a later point (which can be quite a feat with other operating systems), so don’t be too afraid of (potentially) making a wrong decision now.​

 

[linuxlover]

How about lenovo.bastion.intranet? that would become username@lenovo.bastion.intranet
will this be ok or would it be unacceptable or would be accepted during installation and cause problems later?

​

 

[Mirror176]

I presume the only problem with using something that already exists is now your machine will likely resolve the existing domain name to itself; needing to not resolve to itself when the external site is desired is when the problem happens. FreeBSD installer/documentation should really tell people what to do when they haven't purchased a domain name to enter to avoid any possible issue since leaving it blank is not an option (last I tested); I just made something up which happens to be reserved+unused by IANA.