Re: $HOST on OS X

["Benjamin R. Haskell" <zsh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, FranÃois Revol wrote:

> Le 5 juin 2010 Ã 17:45, Benjamin R. Haskell a Ãcrit :
> 
> > So, maybe there was some script you/someone ran that set 
> > HOST=e3191.c.akamaiedge.net, for convenience.  (For uploading things 
> > to Akamai's CDN, maybe?  Seems a bit of a stretch.)
> 
> No it's only a bad habit of OSX to update hostname depending on the 
> joined network, I often noticed this when using wifi or an unusual 
> LAN. So when you open a Terminal at that point it shows this in the 
> prompt and other stuff...

If that's the case, I might expect a hostname like 
pool-68-162-167-80.pitt.east.verizon.net (something from a DHCP pool 
assigned by an ISP).  Not something on akamaiedge.net, which is 
certainly not an ISP.  Unless someone's playing weird games with routing 
via Amazon-EC2.  (More likely, that one in particular seems like some 
upstream DNS misconfiguration, akin to the bad PTR record for an RFC 
1918 address in this post[1].)

Regardless, OS X is far from the only O/S that'll update hostnames when 
you join a network.  And especially on a laptop, it often makes sense.  
For instance, after associating with a university's wireless network, 
your host probably has a different name assigned to it.  Why would it be 
bad to update it?


> IMO it's a security risk though...

What part, and how so?

-- 
Best,
Ben

[1] http://www.techsupportforum.com/networking-forum/networking-support/407794-strange-hostname-private-ip.html