Re: Setting Hostname after BOOPT/DHCP

[Dave Whiteley <d.l.whiteley@ee.leeds.ac.uk>]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 11:06:02PM +1100, Jim Richardson wrote:
> Dave Whiteley <d.l.whiteley@ee.leeds.ac.uk> writes:
> 
> > What is the polite Debian way of automatically setting the hostname
> > after booting using BOOTP/DHCP.
> > 
> > ...  /etc/hostname is identical on all
> > the machines. The IP addresses are correctly discovered and set.  
> > 
> > I know that I could write a script that gets the host IP address, and
> > then gets the name associated with that IP, and then updates the
> > /etc/hostname; and that I could run this script "somewhere" in the
> > bootup process, or even during the login process. ...
> 
> See the man page dhclient-script(8).
> 
> I've had success with a script /etc/dhclient-exit-hooks like this:
> 
>   # Set the hostname 
>   if [ x$reason != xBOUND ] && [ x$reason != REBIND ]; then exit; fi 
>   echo dhclient-exit-hooks: IP address is $new_ip_address 
>   hostname=$( host $new_ip_address | sed -ne 's/Name: //p' ) 
>   hostname $hostname 
>   echo dhclient-exit-hooks: hostname is $( hostname ) 
> 
> You could update /etc/hostname too if you like.
> -- 
> Jim Richardson
> School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Sydney
> jimr@maths.usyd.edu.au  www.maths.usyd.edu.au:8000/jimr.html
> 

Thanks for that. Just for the record, and for anyone else reading the
archives...

I found that the most useful value for $reason on the systems I am
using was not BOUND or REBIND, but REBOOT. Also, my "host" command
obviously returned different text to Jim's, and I needed to change the
s/Name: //p to match the different text.

(Sorry I do not have easy access to the actual script at the moment,
but the changes were not difficult!)

Thanks again,

Dave

-- 
Dave Whiteley
d.l.whiteley@ee.leeds.ac.uk
Phone +44 (0)113 343 2059
School of Electronic and Electrical Engineering
The University of Leeds. Leeds, LS2 9JT,  UK