xfce4-session warning about an unresolvable local hostname

[Benedikt Meurer]

On Jul 23, 2011, at 17:21 , Guido Berhoerster wrote:

> * Benedikt Meurer <benedikt.meurer at googlemail.com> [2011-07-22 08:54]:
>> 
>> On Jul 22, 2011, at 00:14 , Nick Schermer wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Jul 21, 2011 at 9:37 PM, Guido Berhoerster <gber at opensuse.org> wrote:
>>>> as of recently openSUSE does not provide an entry in /etc/hosts
>>>> for mapping a loopback IP address to the local hostname by
>>>> default any more.  This means that now on many desktop boxes the
>>>> local hostname is not resolvable which causes xfce4-session to
>>>> display a scary warning message ("This will prevent Xfce from
>>>> operating correctly."). That specific code apparently hasn't been
>>>> touched in a while, does this still apply and if so, what exactly
>>>> is supposed to break here (the session comes up fine for me if I
>>>> just ignore it)?
>>>> Thanks,
>> 
>> Hm, seems strange, a host that cannot resolve "localhost", what is the rational behind this in openSUSE?
>> 
>>> I agree, maybe Benny can enlighten us what the purpose was of this
>>> message, but to me it seems unrelated to the desktop.
>> 
>> IIRC the SESSION_MANAGER environment variable contained "localhost", so if session clients are unable to resolve "localhost", they will not be able to connect to the session manager. This might have changed in libSM/libICE since then (most probably, otherwise nothing would work on openSUSE).
> 
> Can the check whether getaddrinfo() on the hostname returned by
> gethostname() succeeds be removed from xfce4-session/xfsm-dns.c?
> As I noted in another mail, "localhost" is of course still
> resolvable.

IIRC that specific check was introduced to ensure that SM over TCP works. Can you check the contents of the SESSION_MANAGER envvar when logged in with TCP session management enabled?

> Guido Berhoerster


greets,
Benedikt