How to change hostname without rebooting?

[Jeff Silverman]

"M. Osten" wrote:

> /bin/hostname newhostname
> logout
> login
>
> On Mon, 24 Jul 2000, F. Pascual wrote:
>
> > My company was recently bought by a larger enterprise and has changed its name.  Thus, our 50-client Linux LAN has to have each machine's hostname changed to reflect this.  Is there a way I can change a machine's hostname without having to do a reboot?
> >
> > As admin I have access via SSH to each client.  I'd really hate to reboot each machine -- endusers are very busy most hours of the day and would not appreciate any interruptions.
> >
> >
> >
>

This is a very simple question with a very complicated question.  At a previous job, we had a similar circumstance.  All of customers knew us with a certain address, as did our documentation, some of which was over a decade old and still valid.  Worse,
management was clueless about the implications of changing the names, just utterly clueless.  They perceived us as being unwilling to help their marketing, when in fact we were trying to think of our existing customers and collaborators.  And it was
unnecessary because it is possible to give a machine more than one address.


This is really a sysadmin task because the machine names have to change in the nameservers.   The machine names should not have to change, unless you have two machines with the same name.  One solution we came up with (which management shot down because "it
would look bad") would be to create a delegated subdomain.  For example, if your domain is bigcompany.com, you can create a subdomain called littledivision.bigcompany.com.  The subdomain becomes delegate when the domain creates NS records in the nameserver
that point to a different nameserver.  The nameservers in the domain can be slaves to the master nameserver in the subdomain, this enhances reliability.  Similarly, it is possible for the nameservers in the subdomain to be slaves for the master nameserver
in the domain for the same reason.  It has nothing to do with the business relationship, this is merely a technical matter of having redundant nameservers for reliability.

Your sysadmins should be reading DNS and Bind by Albitz and Liu (O'Reilly).

Again, ve careful with this, because a lot of things depend on nameservice.

Oh, and by the way.... why are you sending this message to the UW Linux mailing list?  This should really go to a usenet group such as comp.os.linux




Jeff

--
Jeff Silverman, sysadmin for the Research Computing Systems (RCS)
University of Washington, School of Engineering, Electrical Engineering Dept.
Box 352500, Seattle, WA, 98125-2500 FAX: (206) 221-5264 Phone (206) 543-9378
jeffs at rcs.ee.washington.edu     http://truk.ee.washington.edu/~jeffs