Recently I changed my network configuration a little and in the process probably messed up my /etc/hosts file a little.

I'm not sure if that's really "wrong", anyway: my hostname (babar) was not listed in the aliases for localhost. That was not a problem as long as my adsl router was running, because /etc/resolv.conf hat that one listed as nameserver and and "search lan". The dsl-router has a runs dns server which will resolve .lan hastnames based on dhcp information... etc. :-)

What's interresting: when I disconnected my dsl router, my hostname's fqdn could not be resolved any more because no nameserver was available. This caused various delays (eg. in exim, maybe rsyslogd ? (I'm running ubuntu karmic)), AND - as I found out by now, triggered a mail to be sent by sudo to the root account every time I'd use sudo. I attached that mail here for reference. I think it' could be improoved.

For example the sender could be mentioned somewhere, as well as the reason why the mail was sent, as well as in the send_mail c-function the hostname string pointer could be checked before attempting to inculde the hostname string in the mail, as not doing so results in binary garbage being included instead.

Cheers

Patrick


- the @babar.homelinux.net sender and receipient addresses are substitued by exim for all local accounts (it's counfigured like that)