Infrastructure Software

Is it ok to set the hostname of a Solaris 8 machine to be the hostname + the fulling qualified domain name?

For example: machine1.mydomain.com instead of just machine1

This would seem to be a relatively simple question, but from the answers I have received so far it isn't!

I have asked Sun themselves, who said that any of their own software should work fine, but that they could not guarentee that any 3rd part software would do so.

I posted to the sunmanagers mailing list and received a variety of responses. Some people said that it should work fine, but enough said that it was strictly speaking an invalid configuration and could cause the machine to become unstable, for me to want to get further confirmation before doing it. One manager actually replied saying he considered it could seriously compromise the stability of the machine.

My own feeling from 10 years of experience of running Solaris machines is that it is wrong to do this and it could cause any number of applications to either not work, or to react in an unusual manner.

A little backgroud to why I am asking this question. We have to install Oracle 9i Application Server. The installer for this application requires the hostname of the machine to be set to the hostname.domainname, though it can be set back to just the hostname after the install is complete., I have some colleges who think its not worth changing the hostnames back.

Sean Timmins
Systems Administrator
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd