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Re: changing hostname



On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 01:53:23PM +0200, Joost Kooij wrote:
| On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 10:31:51AM +0200, Adri wrote:
| > I changed my /etc/hostname from debianAdriano to Adriano
| > 
| > That's because I'd like to bring my debian under the Windows domain of the 
| > company.

[snip lots of fun to read colorful descriptions of how to use linux in
a windows environment]

| > But now I wonder what other files still refer to the old name? What 
| > consequences I'm gonna run into?
| 
| Most things will survive quite well.  The mail system may be a little
| tricky though, mail loops are evil so you should definately make sure
| that that is consistent.  With exim it is easy, run eximconfig again,
| just like you did already.
| 
| "grep -r $oldname /etc" is your friend.  That is what I've done a few
| times in the past and it works quite well.  Vi a bit here and there and
| maybe restart a daemon.  "cat $newname > /proc/sys/kernel/hostname" and
| you need not even reboot AFAIK.

I've changed my hostname a few times (indecisiveness) and had a little
trouble, but not too much.  I used hostname(1) to set the new name in
the currently running kernel.  I found out, through trial and error,
that it isn't persistant through a reboot.  So I used hostname(1) and
vi to change /etc/hostname.  (I also updated /etc/hosts for
convenience)  The problem then was I couldn't reboot -- init would
hang when starting sysklogd.  The solution I found to work was to
disable the daemon(s) (using the install cd to boot to a root shell
and mount the hard drive) causing trouble and then boot.  Once a boot
is successful (btw, you'll get some funny "error" messages if sysklogd
isn't running) re-enable the daemons and reboot.  Then all is well.

I wasn't actually using exim, so it is probably still messed up, but
I'm still not actually using it so it doesn't matter in my case.

-D



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