howdy all, i posted this in the newb thread but got no replies, so i'm trying you guys now

it's very possible that i don't completely understand what a "hostname" is, but i was surprised to see that my hostname when connected to a wireless network via dhcp is localhost. When connected by wired ethernet, it's the usual, dhcp-number-number-blah blah-etc.edu. Does it even matter? When I'm using matlab, I have to adjust the license file to find the right server, but otherwise it doesn't affect me.

Any thoughts? Thanks...

The so called "hostname", eg the name you want your computer to call, is whatever you want it to be.

Physical machines might have zero(normally atleast the loopback) or more network interfaces (NICs, local loopback, PPP or modem connection, etc) and every network interface can have zero or more ip-addressess (generally atleast one) and every ip address has zero or more hostnames, one of them being canonical, other aliases for it.

So the name of your computer is at least "localhost"; every computer (if loopback-interface is not broken) is named as "localhost" and have ip address 127.0.0.1. Your computer might have other names too.

ok, i think i understand now. So in my situation, when the wired interface is loaded, the hostname displayed is reset to be the dynamic hostname/ip address, but when the wireless connection is loaded, the hostname is not. Both however exist (the hostname associated with the wireless ip and the localhost.localdomain loopback).

Assuming my understanding is correct, this brings up another question then- when the wired interface is up, the loopback reference localhost.localdomain doesn't work. For licensing for matlab, I run a license manager on the local machine, and matlab's license file must have the hostname or ip of the license manager in order to start. When I work offline, I change the appropriate line in the license file to localhost.localdomain, but when a network interface is up I have to use the dynamic hostname set by the network. If a physical machine has several hostnames, shouldn't I be able to leave the license file with the line localhost.localdomain and have it work? (it doesn't)

thanks for helping the !

(sorry this has gotten slightly outside the realm of this forum...)


edit: i'm slightly rethinking this a bit... just playing around to see what happened i did a "hostname <myname>" and things broke- hostname was set to <myname>, but then none of the services, etc, could find the right place since <myname> wasn't registered with a naming server.