Symptoms

When you run the tests of SpamAssassin 3.0.0 on Solaris (SPARC or x86) the host may suddenly be renamed to "--fqdn"

The tests that cause this to happen are t/dnsbl and t/spf, which both use the Sys::Hostname::Long class in perl.

This problem is filed in the SpamAssassin Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.spamassassin.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3806

Remedy

Fix this by running "hostname foo" (as root) to rename you system back to "foo" (or whatever name it should have).

The change is not harmful, the only side-effect is that messages processed by SpamAssassin may produce strange header strings like:

X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 (2004-09-13) on --fqdn

Cause

This is caused by a bug in the perl class Sys::Hostname::Long. The bug has been recognized by the Perl developers. The non-POSIX utility "hostname" will not recognize the "--fqdn" switch on Solaris, but will instead interpret it as the argument for a new hostname and renames the host accordingly. (The switch is intended to retrieve the "fully qualified domain name", e.g. "foo.bar.org" instead of just "foo".)

http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=7717