586596 - nsIDNSService::myHostName contains broken hostname

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Networking, defect)

Description

[Toni Ruottu]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.472.25 Safari/534.3
Build Identifier: 

the hostname can not be resolved into an ip address

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. write a Firefox extension in javascript
2. resolve nsIDNSService::myHostName

Actual Results:  
resolving fails as the given hostname does not exist

Expected Results:  
resolving succeeds and returns a set of addresses for the local network interfaces

Comment 1

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

There is no guarantee that a machine's hostname can get translated to an IP address (although usually that works). Furthermore, even when it works, you normally get a single address, which can be 127.0.0.1.

As filed, this bug is invalid. I can see how it would be nice to provide an API to enumerate all IP addresses of the host, but that doesn't currently exist and is a different issue.

(Why does your machine not have an entry for your hostname in /etc/hosts?)

Comment 2

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

The /etc/hosts question was assuming you're on Linux, though maybe that was wrong - the user-agent disagrees with the os field?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

fwiw, Mac OS X also has (and uses) an /etc/hosts.