topic Re: Valid hostnames in Operating System - HP-UX

Valid hostnames

H_16 — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 11:59:17 GMT

Can I use hyphen in a hostname on a HPUX 11.23 PA-RISC

US-APP-LIVE01

Re: Valid hostnames

Pete Randall — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:07:43 GMT

Do a man on uname and on hostname.

Pete

Re: Valid hostnames

Pete Randall — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:29:34 GMT

After that somewhat cursory answer, I did a little reading myself and I can't find any specific exclusion of hyphens in a name. The length , however, seems to be 8 characters as a general rule. I believe this can be altered/extended but it is not usually recommended.

My own recommendation would be to stick with an 8 character, hyphen-less name.

Pete

Re: Valid hostnames

Dennis Handly — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:47:00 GMT

I have a whole family of machines with "-". The only problem was a perl script that wasn't expecting that char.

Re: Valid hostnames

VK2COT — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:52:42 GMT

Hello,

Hyphen is perfectly valid character in hostnames.

Use upper and lower case alphabet,
numerals, hyphen and dot.

Yes, eight characters in hostnames
is the limitation in most Unices.
It can be extended in HP-UX 11.31
through dynamic kernel parameter
expanded_node_host_names but you need
to ensure that your applications can
support it!

Cheers,

VK2COT

Re: Valid hostnames

Bob E Campbell — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:02:50 GMT

To be clear...

hostname can be set to more than 8 chars, uname cannot. It is strongly *recommended* that uname and hostname return the same value.

That said, you can have plenty of aliases set to the same IP address.

Re: Valid hostnames

VK2COT — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:08:55 GMT

Hello,

Yes, Bob is right.

I actually check for presence of hostname and uname settings in config file.

Here is part of my own HP-UX audits:

CHECKING NODENAME LENGTH
________________________
AUDIT-PASS: Nodename length (5 for ia644) satisfies recommended limit of 8 characters
AUDIT-INFO: Dynamic kernel parameter expanded_node_host_names is available

CHECKING HOSTNAME CONTAINS VALID CHARACTERS
___________________________________________
AUDIT-PASS: Valid characters in hostname ia644
AUDIT-NOTE: RFCs define valid characters as 'a-zA-Z0-9.-'

AUDIT-INFO: Hostname ia644 contains alphabetic characters only

AUDIT-INFO: Variable "HOSTNAME" in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf set to "ia644"

AUDIT-INFO: Variable "NODENAME" not set in /etc/rc.config.d/netconf

Perl script is here:

http://www.circlingcycle.com.au/Unix-sources/HP-UX-check-OAT.pl.txt

Cheers,

VK2COT