During the instalation of a system, I didn't set the the name of the machine. So it was set to the default of localhost.localdomain. So I did the command;

hostname fileserver.mydomain

However, I am not sure if that is all that I have to do. I pico into /etc/hosts and it still says localhost.localdomain localhost

Also, at the shell screen it still says kenny@localhost

When I run the command hostname to get the output it does say fileserver.mydomain

What is going on?

What distro are you using?

cheers

Jamie...

Redhat 8.0

Ok. I tried something else now. I ran the command
#hostname fileserver

and

#domainname mydomain

Now my shell screen does say kenny@fileserver

However, when I pico into /etc/hosts it still has the following;

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

127.0.0.1 should be listed as localhost as this is the loopback addresses used by lots of software. You might also want to add your server's name after 'localhost' if you don't have any other IP addresses (say associated with a network card etc).

At boot time your system must read the hostname from somewhere and set it. So you'll find that your sucessful canges to you hostname won't survive a reboot. Take a look at /etc/sysconfig/network

cheers

Jamie...

I was told that there are several different places that need to have the hostname and domainname changed in order for it to work. He told me that the command will take care of it. But I guess it isn't working. Because both /etc/host and /etc/sysconfig/network still say localhost.localdomain

So you are telling me that if I reboot that machine, it will go back to localhost.localdomain?

How do I fix this?

Thanks

Neither hostname or domainname change either of the files you've mentioned. You need to change them yourself.

At boot time settings are read from the relevant files and programs like hostname are called to set them for the system. The hosts file (/etc/hosts) is only used to resolve hostnames to ip addresses, it doesn't actually effect what hostname is used by a system.

Try editing /etc/sysconfig/network then reboot and see what happens. If you don't edit the files yourself then yeah - the hostname will be reset to localhost.localdomain the next time you reboot.

cheers

Jamie...

That did it thanks for your help.

One more thing. My friend also told me the reason that I had to change the name using the command was because there might be other parts of the system that will not know the name had changed and that the dependenies would be broke. Is this true?

Regards

Good good...

You were right to use hostname and domainname to change your settings, but to make it persistant accross reboots you needed to edit the files that the system reads at boot time to decide what it should set your hostname/domain name to. I'm sure that there is some nice graphical tool that you would typically use in Redhat to set this, but I've got no idea what it is.

Glad its sorted

Jamie...

That's ok. I would rather learn how to do everything from the command line anyway. So far everything I was doing was using SSH through the network.

Thanks again.