openSUSE 11.1: Where'd my hostname go? - Jonathan Pryor's web log

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openSUSE 11.1: Where'd my hostname go?

After playing with the openSUSE 11.1 beta releases and final release, I finally installed it onto my main workstation. Funny how actually using it ~full-time shows things that were previous missed...

In this case, what greeted me when I opened a shell was:

jon@linux-jcq7$

This was rather unexpected, as this wasn't the hostname I wanted. No matter, this was normal after a fresh install (and has been happening for eons). So off I go to YaST to edit the Network Settings (/sbin/yast2 lan)...

Previously (i.e. on openSUSE 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 11.0), I could go to the Hostname/DNS tab, to the Hostname and Domain Name section, and specify a Hostname. (Whereupon everything would break until the next reboot as Gnome didn't seem to like the hostname changing on it, but at least I had the right hostname!)

Under openSUSE 11.1, this is disabled when NetworkManager controls things. (Again, this was not the case under 11.0 and prior releases, even when using NetworkManager to control things.)

So how do we change the hostname? Perusing Control Center brought forth the Network Connections applet → Wired tab → connection name (e.g. System eth0) → Edit → IPv4 Settings tab's DHCP Client ID textbox. This was nice to find -- I'd often wondered why setting the DHCP Client Identifier within YaST Network Settings seemingly had no effect; DHCP Client ID does work -- but it had no effect during bootup (presumably because NetworkManager isn't running early enough to set the hostname), so my shell prompt was still wrong.

Similarly, the "traditional" technique of hand-editing /etc/hosts (or using the new-fangled Hostnames YaST applet) seemed to have no effect on the system name after a reboot.

So how do we really change the hostname? Edit /etc/HOSTNAME, which is a single line file containing the fully-qualified hostname to use during bootup.

Posted on 21 Dec 2008 | Path: /development/ | Permalink