Hi all. I've a couple of questions to throw your way. First, I've been running my own email and web server for 19 years at the university here using Slackware. In the beginning I had no choice of name for the machine but now I do and I'd like to change it. The problem is that if I do this then my email addresses and web pages will suddenly disappear. So, my thought was to add a second card and register it with the uni IT folks with a name of my choosing. Finally, my questions. Will this effectively present two machines to the world from one server? Will email sent to either name work? Same for web stuff. Are there any gotcha's that I should look for? If this will work then I can phase out the old name over, say, a year and then mothball it.

If you are adding the card in order to register a second MAC address and obtain a second IP it will not work. You cannot easily have two ports on the same ethernet subnet. For the reason why, look at the routing table. Only one port will be used for any given destination.

Simpler is to just change DNS to the new name and add a CNAME (alias) for the old name. That way all lookups will find you for either name.

Thanks, Smallpond. I guess that's the route (pun intended) that I'll take with IT.