debian shell prompt does not reflect changed hostname

Luminaro · 10-27-2012, 05:16 AM

When I change the hostname in /etc/hostname and reeboot the machine, the shell prompt still shows the old hostname.

Command hostname shows the correct, newly set name.

Shell prompt is defined as:
PS1 = ${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$

I have already checked /etc/init.d/hostname.sh, tried it manually with start parameter, and it correctly echoed the new name.

So, the value of \h in PS1 seems to be resolved from somewhere else - any ideas?

Thanks!

jlinkels · 10-27-2012, 06:31 AM

I don't know what exactly is the problem. But changing the host name is routine in Debian. In /etc grep for the old host name. This should turn up 4 files. Probably less in your case because you already commenced the change. Anyway, edit all the files that you find replacing the host name.

I did this in Squeeze most recently. Will do this week in Wheezy. Maybe there is something moved to a subdir in the conf.d style which becomes more current.

Try the grep first and please reort back.

jlinkels

Luminaro · 10-27-2012, 09:22 AM

grep 'newname' /etc/* returns one file: /etc/hostname

grep 'oldname' /etc/* does NOT return any file, still the prompt says root@oldname, also -R option did not find any relevant files

Thanks, Luminaro

PS: just realized that I had found earlier the oldname in the /etc/hosts file, last line, own IP. Changing this entry did not have any effect. It explains though that the hosts file did not come up with grep.

jlinkels · 10-27-2012, 04:15 PM

Strange, that never happened to me before. Something must be different and non-vanilla in that Debian installation.

Check this where about every possibility of wrong prompts is described: http://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...ompt-unchanged. And I am out of ideas, sorry.

jlinkels

EDDY1 · 10-27-2012, 04:56 PM

http://adminuser.wordpress.com/2008/...ian-or-ubuntu/

Luminaro · 10-28-2012, 04:25 AM

jlinkels: thanks for the link, the only new point was a possible interference of DHCP which (as far as I can tell) is not active on this host. Also out of ideas for now. Will leave this open and document the solution as soon as any comes up.