Once upon a time I needed to NFS export filesystems to a lot ofworkstations, in a situation where I was worried about size limitsin /etc/exports (and we didn't use YP/NIS, so we couldn't just puteverything in netgroups). In situations like this, one thing to dois to shrink hostnames down as much as possible, and that's what wedid.

(This was back in an era where the existence of such limits were at leastplausible.)

As a side note to looking up hostnames from IP addresses for people who use /etc/hosts , note that /etc/hosts lookups work badly in the presence of hosts with multipleIP address, since most gethostbyname() implementations will onlyreturn the first IP address that they find in /etc/hosts . These daysyou really want a minimal /etc/hosts and a reliable DNS server, unlessyou have special concerns .

(The gethostbyname() behavior is sensible, since otherwise it wouldalways have to

By a persistent VNC session, I mean a session that you can connect yourVNC viewer to, do stuff, disconnect from, and then later come back toconnect to it again. This makes it the graphical equivalent of screen , at least for me.

(Much like screen , it also gives you a certain amount of immunityagainst network and workstation stability problems for critical tasksthat you don't want interrupted. More and more, systems have to bemanaged graphically instead of through text interfaces, which means that