Re: Changing Hostname?

[Reco <recoverym4n@gmail.com>]

Hi.

On Sat, 21 Dec 2013 22:32:06 -0500
Jon N <jdnandroid@gmail.com> wrote:

> It does return the new hostname.  But, I started wondering about legal
> characters.  If you remember my old one was 'localhost-01' but in my
> new one I used an underscore (_).  According to
> netregister.biz/faqit.htm no symbols are usable except the hyphen (-).
>  No accented characters either.  So I changed the name again and
> rebooted once more.  This time everything started just fine.

You're citing wrong page. Right one is RFC 952, ASSUMPTIONS chapter.

http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc952


 Not empty, but if it contains illegal characters it won't make any
> difference.  I didn't find any error messages that would clue me in to
> the problem (like: "Warning, you have illegal characters in your
> hostname" :-)).  I did notice on one boot an error message that
> 'hostname.sh' (in /etc/init.d) had failed, but I searched all my log
> files and could not find any reference to it at all.  I guess not
> everything you see on screen during boot makes it into one of the log
> files.

Should be there. 

# echo FOO_BAR > /etc/hostname
# /etc/init.d/hostname.sh start
hostname: the specified hostname is invalid


Still, the kernel itself allows one to shoot in the foot:

# sysctl -w kernel.hostname=FOO_BAR
kernel.hostname = FOO_BAR
# hostname
FOO_BAR


Reco