[erlang-questions] : : [SOLVED] Can't set long node name on windows

[David Tucker]

On Jul 6, 2007 3:21 PM, Per Hedeland <per@REDACTED> wrote:

> "Dmitrii 'Mamut' Dimandt" <dmitriid@REDACTED> wrote:
> >
> >I should really be careful when reading books :) :
> >
> >    "We can also use -sname on two different machines when they are
> >    on the same subnet. Using -sname is also the only method that will
> >    work if no DNS service is available."
>
> Uh, unfortunately basically everything in that quote is wrong. -name vs
> -sname is a matter of host/domain names, a concept that is quite
> orthogonal to the concept of subnets. And -name works just fine without
> DNS, as long as you put fully-qualified names in /etc/hosts or whatever
> you're using. The erl(1) man page has it right of course, but is maybe a
> bit terse.
>
> The important thing is that the hostname part of a node name must be
> unique (among hosts), predictable, and usable by all involved. If your
> Windows box thinks that its name is foo.WORKGROUP, while your Unix box
> thinks that the Windows box is called foo.your.domain, and has no idea
> how to reach a host called foo.WORKGROUP, you will have problems. In
> some cases they may agree on the "foo" part, which is where -sname helps
> (at the cost of messing things up when you want foo.example.org and
> foo.example.com to be able to communicate). But the Windows box may
> actually think that its name is DMITRIIS_COMPUTER, a name that isn't
> known by anything outside (at best) the bunch of Windows boxes on your
> network.
>
> The clear and obvious way out of this mess is "everything should use
> DNS", which amazingly still seems to be a problem in the Windows world.
>
> >Apart from that, Kirill Zaborski suggested that I directly write
> >nodename@REDACTED So I ran
> >
> >    erl -name another_name@REDACTED
>
> This is actually quite a good workaround when you have a "Windows mess"
> - or for that matter a private home network where you can't be bothered
> to set up DNS or even distribute hosts files. Using IP addresses clearly
> fulfills the unique&predictable&usable requirement. Unfortunately it's
> not documented that you can specify the hostname part at all with -name,
> let alone that the IP address can be used for it (I think at least the
> latter may actually be an "accidental" feature).


This still doesn't work for me.  I'm running Windows XP with Erlang 5.6;
when I do:

erl -name foobar@REDACTED

I get a popup box saying "erl.exe has encountered a problem and needs to
close."  There are no other error messages.  Has anyone else encountered
this bug?  Can anyone suggest how to workaround or diagnose the problem?
Thanks.

Dave



>
> The downside is that there is zero sanity check on the hostname part,
> you can give anything you want there (whether name or IP address), and
> so can easily create a different kind of mess.
>
> --Per Hedeland
>
>
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