Hello;

I want to change my servers node name which is the output of "#uname -n"

Server is CentOS 5

I searched but couldn't find. There was some search results about /etc/nodename but I don't have a file at that path. Also some said uname -S which doesn't work...

How can I change it?

uname -n just prints your hostname which is stored in /etc/hostname

See man hostname

No it doesn't print what's in the hostname.

I'm using a vps, could it be the reason of that?

Possibly, but if you had mentioned "vps", I would not have replied.
What is a "vps" ?

A VPS is a Virtual Private Server, i.e. a server running in a virtual machine.

The usual way I change the hostname in CentOS 5 is to edit it in /etc/sysconfig/network. I generally find that it takes a reboot to make all programs "see" the new hostname.

Vps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server

@btmiller

Yes It's probably changed in that file but after I reboot it always changed to its original value. So yes problem is because of vps.

Thanks guys

Do you get your IP via DHCP. I believe DHCP can get its host name from the DHCP server ... maybe this is what's happening to you?

nope. ip is static

Some background before I get into the node name update process that worked for me. I'm configuring a bunch of load balanced blades on CentOS 5.4 with non-ARPing loopback configured by adding an entry to the rc.local file and to get "ifconfig" reading that, I wasn't rebooting, but just running "/etc/rc.d/rc.local".

Anyway, I too was frustrated by "uname -n" not being settable. I had some blades that reported different values, including the IP in their node name. That's what I wanted. I even tried strace -o, but all that told me was that uname was getting called! But I also had a bunch that didn't, instead just reporting "localhost.localdomain" as their nodename, so I knew there was something different in the process, and nothing config file related as I followed the same setup for all. Like you, nothing worked to set it...until I executed a reboot, at which point nodename updated to the desired change.

So, the setting is there somewhere in the init chain, not sure where yet, but you can try a reboot and hopefully that'll do it for you too.