akara/faban — Issue #22: Hostnames with '.' cause CmdAgent to fail
Author: shanti
Created: 2012-01-04 01:05:18+00:00
State: open

The harness tries to simplify hostnames by stripping out everything after a '.' - it assumes that these are all part of the domain name (see com.sun.faban.harness.agent.AgentBootstrap.startAgents() - lines 308-310).
But some hosts genuinely need the first '.' as this is part of the hostname itself. For example, on Macs, the default hostname has a '.local' extension. If the name is stripped, then the harness is unable to start the CmdAgent on this host.

Of course, there is no guarantee that keeping just the first '.' is sufficient. Perhaps there are hosts that have more than one dot in their names (unlikely?)
As a compromise between long hostnames in log files and having things working on Macs (as well as other machines) it might be a good idea to at least not strip the first dot extension.