What A Night - Changing Solaris Machine Names

Hey there,

Some more possibly boring, but definitely useful, trivia about working on Solaris. Just got off an emergency shift re-purposing a whole bunch of boxes.

It's actually really simple work to change a solaris hosts name. Just need to make sure you hit all the bases.

The files you have to edit are the same for Solaris 8/9 and 10, except for one.

All you need to edit, and run, to change your hostname is:

Edit: /etc/hosts - make your main hostname change here. If possible include an entry for your defaultrouter!
/etc/hostname.NIC (e.g. hostname.ce0) - may be more than one of these depending.
/etc/nodename - the main hostname of your server
/etc/inet/net/*/hosts (Solaris 8/9) - just change the hostname in the hosts files.
/etc/inet/ipnodes (Solaris 10) - change the hostname here
/etc/defaultrouter - you can enter an IP here, but I prefer to enter a hostname and list that in /etc/hosts (above)

Then execute:
hostname NewHostname (as root)
uname -S NewHostname (as root)

And reboot if you like. There's always running sys-unconfig, but it takes out every modification you've ever made. It'll even zero out your resolv.conf file (why???)

Anyway - Enjoy your rest - I have to be back at work in a few minutes ;)

, Mike

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