SEO

So, it may seem obvious to the knowledgeable, but a little knowledge
is a dangerous thing. And I'd like to write a note about the booby
traps to warn others.

* Select your new hostname. It can only have up to 8 characters, and
should avoid punctuation, especially periodsy, and should be entirely
lowercase to follow the published DNS standards.
* Get your new hostname ready in your local DNS and, if necessary, /
etc/hosts tables on other machines.
* Back up a copy of /etc/hosts and /etc/default/tcp, so you can back
out your changes if needed.
* Announce downtime for the host: you're going to need a reboot to
make sure everything's perfect.
* Back up your machine and take any network services offline.
* Kiss your X sessions on the machine goodbye. This includes remote X
terminals and the "scologin" window at your normal login screen.
* Go to a *non-X-displayed* shell prompt. This is because changing the
host name in the middle of the X sessions can seriously screw up the X
session.
* Hit Ctrl-Alt-F1 from the console to get a pure text screen.
* Log in as root, or su to be root.
* Run the command "netconfig". Note that this non-X based session is
considerably more powerful than the X based GUI!!!
* Set the new hostname in netconfig. Make sure that the rest of your
settings are correct as well.
* Allow netconfig to rebuild your kernel and make the new kernel the
default. (In my opinion, OpenServer is way, way, way too eager to
rebuild kernels!)
* Check that /etc/hosts and /etc/default/tcp and the command
"hostname" now all say what you expect.
* Reboot
* Test servics.

The bit about using the text-mode netconfig is critical. You might get
away with one change, but then if you change it back from an X based
session, you get screwed up.

Also note that /etc/hosts on SCO OpenServre 5.0.x uses a non-standard
format for /etc/hosts: most operating systems use this, for good
reasons having to do with reverse hostname lookups

192.168.0.1 hostname.domain.com hostname

SCO does this, which went out of style 15 years ago, and is
unfortunately reset as the standard every time you touch the netconfig
or other GUI's. It also makes Kerberos compilation impossible without
modifying the Kerbreos source code.

192.168.0.1 hostname hostname.domain.com

Also, the output of `uname -m` and the `hostname` command don't
match, unlike every other OS I've dealt with in the last 15 years.
`uname -m` publishes the un-qualified "hostname" word, while the
command `hostname` published "hostname.domain.com". This will drive
you *nuts* if you're used to more contemporary behavior and trying to
check your work.

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote (on Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 01:39:27AM -0700):
> So, it may seem obvious to the knowledgeable, but a little knowledge
> is a dangerous thing. And I'd like to write a note about the booby
> traps to warn others.

instead of all this, why not 'uname -S' ?

--
_________________________________________
Nachman Yaakov Ziskind, FSPA, LLM awacs@ziskind.us
Attorney and Counselor-at-Law http://ziskind.us
Economic Group Pension Services http://egps.com
Actuaries and Employee Benefit Consultants

----- Original Message -----
From: "N. Yaakov Ziskind" <awacs@ziskind.us>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
To: <distro@jpr.com>
Sent: Friday, March 28, 2008 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: How to change your hostname in SCO OpenServer 5.0.6


> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote (on Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 01:39:27AM -0700):
>> So, it may seem obvious to the knowledgeable, but a little knowledge
>> is a dangerous thing. And I'd like to write a note about the booby
>> traps to warn others.
>
> instead of all this, why not 'uname -S' ?

Actually there are several possible gotchas to look out for. Most of them don't apply to most people, but they exist and each admin should at least look over the list once so that they will recognize when to pay extra attention later on some box where some of them would apply.

Jeff Leibermann compiled a pretty exhaustive checklist several years ago that covers both ip and name change issues.

http://aplawrence.com/Jeffl/new_name.html

Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR
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