Hi All,

I had always worked fine with my Red hat 4.0 untill yesterday night when i logged in i had an error saying: "HOSTNAME could not be found, you can resolve this by editing the /etc/hosts"

eventually it logged me in but when i launch the terminal ...i now see 'username@(none)dir' .

In other words my HOSTNAME shows as 'none'.

I looked into /etc/hosts file but everything looks the same, which for is:

127.0.0.1 mluboya

When i look into network configuration, my host is well: mluboya

Could someone please help !!!

Thank you

Have you tried setting the hostname ?
As root :
hostname your_host_name

This is temporary until a reboot, you need it in the /etc/hosts file too.

Also, a hostname is usually like host.domain.tld
I don't know if a single word will work.
Even the default is localhost.localdomain

regards

Alan

Your host name is stored in the file /etc/hostname not /etc/hosts

You need to find out how this change to your system happened... Have you been compromised?

Note that hostname doesn’t change anything permanently.
After reboot original names from /etc/hosts are used again.

From man hostname fedora 12

There are several places it needs setting, but they can all be done from GUI components.
I pointed out in your other post that you have probably been rooted.

Thanks All for replies:

currently im unable to login as normal user, so i logged in as Root and tried to change /etc/hosts with following contents:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain

i also change the hostname with:

hostname localhost.localdomain

The changes have been made but when i reboot, HOSTNAME on my terminal still shows as NONE

when i looked into the /var/log/messages, i think the problem lies with these errors i found:

ifup: Missing config file ifcfg
network: bringing up loopback interface: FAILED

my ethernet card is fine cause i use dual boot on this laptop and on windows ethernet is ok.

Please, do you know how can we go about it ?

Thanks

Make sure there is a hostname set in /etc/HOSTNAME (case sensitive).

Also, make this line in /etc/hosts:

into this line:

Hi camphor,

Thanks for the reply... i did what you said but still same error.

i first more /etc/HOSTNAME but its not there so i vi it and filled it with: 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

i did the same with /etc/hosts.

But still same error ...

Any ideals guys..???

Please help ...

Have you checked your system out yet ? Your external USB drive stopped connecting and your hostname (and ifcfg) have disappeared. Things like that just don't happen.
Get a live cd and run virus checks and rootkit checks before you go any further.
I suggest INSERT
http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html
Use chkrootkit to see if your files have been rooted.