Thanks. I have updated it to reflect this.


No guide yet, but if any one wants to loan me a spare Linode for a week or two I can write one.

It does not need to be the FQDN. It also does not need any domain name. It should be the hostname for the referenced machine. IMHO It is a good idea to set it up host.domain in case you are working within multiple domains. You can safely use host.domain.TLD but most people don't use multiple TLD's with the same host.domain pointing to different machines. You can just use host and use no domain or TLD and this is the minimum that should be used.

Use of domain.TLD should be limited to those folks who only intend to use one server ever within their entire domain. The hostname does not need to resolve locally or globally, it is only the name the OS thinks it should be called.

I do think jsalloum has a bit of a point. You want to stress that it is the hostname and not the domainname setting.

For reference, when forcing the eth0 up on my linode the other day it also assumed only the host portion (lix-abc) from the FQDN for the IP via reverse DNS.