Oh my bad, this was exactly what Tim was getting at.

primHostName does answer my machine name correctly, albeit with domain (as
in `hostname`, not `hostname -s`).

It's only because useOldNetwork is true in my image that instead it answers
the interface address.

So to Tim's point, yes, I'd think exposing that primitive again makes
sense, with a sensible method name.

Vanessa

On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 11:29 AM Vanessa Freudenberg <vanessa at codefrau.net>
wrote:

> While all of that is true, there is a difference between a routable name
> (which obviously is interface-specific) and the standard host name for the
> current machine, which is for humans, not for other machines. That's what
> the primHostName is supposed to answer. It should be equivalent to running
> `hostname -s` on a unix command line. It is useful, as long as users are
> aware of what it actually refers to.
>
> Now the actual implementation of primHostName across VMs is not unified
> because (I believe) the intention of that primitive was not
> well-documented. On my machine (macOS VM) it answers the IPv4 address of
> the first external interface, apparently, which is not what I think it
> should answer.
>
> Vanessa
>
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2023 at 10:33 AM Bruce O'Neel <bruce.oneel at pckswarms.ch>
> wrote:
>
>> Oh it is worse than that.
>>
>> A system really doesn't have a canonical host name per se.  It can have:
>>
>> 1. One IP address and no host names
>> 2. One IP address and one host name
>> 3. One IP address and multiple host names
>> 4. Multiple IP addresses and one host name (different disconnected
>> networks, say IPv6/IPv4 or 1G/10G/40G)
>> 5. Multiple IP addresses and multiple host names (but not necessarily a
>> one to one mapping)
>>
>> and of course one hostname can map to multiple IP addresses on different
>> independent machines.
>>
>> The idea is that a hostname resolves to an address and that address lets
>> you reach an interface on a machine.
>>
>> The result of the hostname command does not even have to map in such a
>> way that from outside the machine that hostname will allow you reach that
>> machine.
>>
>> cheers
>>
>> bruce
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2023-03-30T18:53:50.000+02:00, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
>>
>>   On 2023-03-29, at 11:32 PM, Jakob Reschke <jakres+squeak at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  Hi,
>>
>>  I cannot contribute to the concrete question, but note that a host can have multiple addresses and can therefore be reachable under multiple host names. Depending on what you try to do, it may matter and you better check that you actually get the name that you expect in your production environment.
>>
>>
>> Yup, we've managed to make it very complicated. I'm sure OS people had excellent reasons but, boy, I wish somebody had seen a way to make it simpler. Anyway, my hypothesis is that using the hostname command means that we (Squeak) do do at least as well as we (commandline) can sensibly manage. If it is really the case that the question isn't properly answerable then we ought to remove the related methods etc so as to remove a point of confusion and error.
>>
>> tim
>> --
>> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
>> Strange OpCodes: START: Cancel preceding jobs in queue
>>
>>
>>
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