Hi Everyone,

This came up on a Debian mailing list, but it applies to Fedora. And perhaps Red Hat, too.

My /etc/hosts has the following entries and comments. I added the 127.0.1.1 entry manually.

   $ cat /etc/hosts
   # Loopback entries; do not change.
   # For historical reasons, localhost precedes localhost.localdomain:
   127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
   ::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

   # 127.0.1.1 is often used for the FQDN of the machine
   127.0.1.1   skylake.home.arpa skylake

   # See hosts(5) for proper format and other examples:
   # 192.168.1.10 foo.mydomain.org foo
   # 192.168.1.13 bar.mydomain.org bar

The problem is, someone owns mydomain.org. It is a real domain.

   $ whois mydomain.org | grep -E 'Name|ID'
   Domain Name: mydomain.org
   Registry Domain ID: 43938f3b31594bc394234043672173ed-LROR
   Registrar IANA ID: 228
   ...

I believe it would be much better if Fedora's /etc/hosts template used example.{com|net|org}, or home.arpa. home.arpa is a recent addition (circa 2018) to IANA's special-use domains. Cf., <https://www.iana.org/assignments/special-use-domain-names/special-use-domain-names.xhtml>.

I would also suggest to add a comment to /etc/hosts that tells a reader to check IANA's document in addition to the documentation for hosts(5).

-----

This happened on Fedora 38, x86_64, fully patched.

$ lsb_release -a
LSB Version:    :core-4.1-amd64:core-4.1-noarch
Distributor ID: Fedora
Description:    Fedora release 38 (Thirty Eight)
Release:        38
Codename:       ThirtyEight

-----

And /etc/hosts belongs to setup-2.14.3-2.fc38 on this machine.

$ dnf whatprovides /etc/hosts
setup-2.14.3-2.fc38.noarch : A set of system configuration and setup files
Repo        : @System
Matched from:
Filename    : /etc/hosts

setup-2.14.3-2.fc38.noarch : A set of system configuration and setup files
Repo        : fedora
Matched from:
Filename    : /etc/hosts