Hi,

I was installing some software on my computer (blender and openal to be exact, though I think these had nothing to do with the current situation), when all of a sudden, X applications refused to startup (while I was already in X with xfce, a terminal and firefox running)! So I logged out of X relogged in and saw that my hostname had suddenly changed from "thabox" to "-s".

What the hell??!!! How did that happen? A reboot undid this, but this is downright scary

Do I need to be worried for the security of my box. Is it possible that an external threat (hacker) did this. My firewall is up and running though, and I check if everything is in order by going to https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 and have my security checked.

Please advice!!

Thanks

You always need to be concerned about security. You might download and run chkrootkit and rkhunter just to be on the safe side. Maybe a buggy install script did it, though> How were you installing the software (source or package)? Also which distro was this?

Hi,

No, I got the problem. The software that I was trying to install, blender, did after all cause the problem. I was installing this from source, and for some strange reason, it wanted to change the hostname of the computer. Why on earth that???
Oh well, another problem solved. Now if I could only get blender compiled (not easy!).
I'm running linux from scratch btw.

Thanks..