[lug] Using hostname

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Tue, 2007-03-27 at 16:36 -0600, Bill Thoen wrote:
> I've got a Fedora Core 5 system, and I tried to change the system name 
> using:
> 
> hostname new_name
> 
> When I did that it seemed to work (uname -a showed the new system name) 
> but then when I tried to open another terminal window from the gnome 
> gui, it wouldn't open. I had to change the name back to 
> localhost.localdomain to get it to work again.

Not positive of this, however:

Hostname changes require a network restart.  It may require a reboot,
but I'm not positive of that.  Also, assuming a reboot is not necessary,
you need to logout of your GNOME session and then log back in.  The
current session has probably cached the hostname in your terminal prompt
based on the original GDM login.  New terminal windows inherit that
setting and don't actually query the system for it.

> So how do I change the system name so that I can still open new terminal 
> windows (with everything else also working as before) and I see 
> bthoen at new_name$ as my prompt?

I'm pretty sure you need to log out and log back in.  
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Senior Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
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