Hello All,

if I need to change the hostname of a machine...i"m assuming I change the entry in /etc/hosts. Is there any other file I need to alter?

I should wait on this, but I'm gonna take a stab...

I believe you don't edit /etc/hosts to define your hostname, instead you would edit a file like /etc/HOSTNAME /etc/hostname or on some systems it's in a directory /etc/sysconfig/host

You could also temporarily set it with:
hostname newhostname
where newhostname is the hostname you want it to be. Note that after a reboot it will return to the default if it's not changed in the configuration file that your distro uses.

Cool

actually it is the file /etc/sysconfig/network, edit the

HOSTNAME=.

this will be available even after a reboot.

a quicker way - edit

/proc/sys/kernel/hostname.

but that won't be saved when you reboot.
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MasterC never sleeps???
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Thanks for covering me

And it would surely seem I don't, I know.

The cool part about it is that I actually have a full time job, take care of my house, have a decent social life and still have time to get at least 6 hours of sleep a day.

Here's the catch though:
I'm in the US Navy. I'm a pharmacy tech that works nights by myself, in a pharmacy in a small hospital, and lucky for me, rarely does anything happen. I get to spend nearly all 12 of my hours at work, on a T3 connection to LQ. Before I became a moderator I was known as an LQ Addict and the title was replaced but the spirit surely wasn't. In fact I spend more time here now than before

Cool

MasterC rocks!

Does anyone know how to change the $HOSTNAME without a reboot? I thought restarting networking (/etc/init.d/networking) would do the trick, but it doesn't.

Randy

how about the command "hostname"?


hostname [yourhostname]

GO TO TERMINAL

cd /etc

cat hostname or could be HOSTNAME
"hostname" ok - that is the name you want to change

this is your command to change the HOSTNAME on the FLY

perl -pi'.bak' -e 's/hostname/newhostname/' motd HOSTNAME

then check to see if it changed

type again:

cat HOSTNAME
"newhostname"

Why changed host name? I want to know the parts of hostname file under /etc/hosts .

Thanks for your help.

Your help is greatly appreciated by me and others.

You will need to edit the /etc/hosts file on your other computers, unless you run a nameserver. In /etc/hosts, you have an entry for localhost which is accessed.

If you do change your computers hostname, you wil need to log out of KDE. Even if you edit a file, I think that you need to run the "hostname" command as well if you don't reboot. There are environment variables $HOST & $HOSTNAME that contain the hostname and may be used by some libraries.

Ok, currently my /etc/hostname shows the correct hostname. uname -a & cat /proc/sys/kernel/hostname does as well. However, cron jobs still email out w/ the incorrect hostname & when I first login via SSH that very first line also show the incorrect hostname. What did I miss, do I just have to reboot?

uid0sd@machine:~$ ssh correct_hostname
uid0sd@correct_hostname's password:
Linux previous_hostname 2.6.20-16-server #2 SMP Wed May 23 01:53:06 UTC 2007 i686

The programs included with the Ubuntu system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Ubuntu comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by
applicable law.
You have mail.
Last login: Tue Sep 11 07:53:25 2007 from machine.domain.com
To run a command as administrator (user "root"), use "sudo <command>".
See "man sudo_root" for details.

uid0sd@correct_hostname:~$

you can do it without reboot check linux section on sysdigg

for future reference here is a how-to on changing the hostname in Linux.. http://www.cpqlinux.com/hostname.html

I suggest going through the how-to section by section and verifying everything is correct, then check your hostname again..

You dont' have to even reboot the server ..

check this document