Hostnames and interface files

jayeola · 05-23-2009, 05:54 AM

On Debian the host is defined once: - /etc/hosts
It's defined twice in a RH, Fedora, CentOS box:-
[0] /etc/hosts and [1] /etc/sysconfig/network. Why is this? I guess the hosts file is the most important but what is network file for? Is it just for setting stuff like ipv6 or ipv4?

Finally, why does RH have a seperate file for each interface in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcg-{eth,wlan}X? I think that it's simpler to have all of the interfaces specified in one file the way Debian does it in /etc/network/interfaces.

fuubar2003 · 05-23-2009, 08:14 PM

SuSE does the same thing by using seperate files for each interface. I've always liked the way Debian does things. In SuSE, YaST is the UI tool to configure most things including network and I suspect that may be why things are more complex with the big enterprise distros.