topic Re: long Machine Name in Operating System - HP-UX

long Machine Name

Ahmed_41 — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 05:44:59 GMT

Dear All
i am having a very long mahine HPUX 11.11 name like abcdefghijk, i find my machine only named with 8 charcters of this name, i need to be able to use this long name, what files shall i change the name in it ???
i already did the hosts file with the Ip and the correct name (long one)i need, also the netconf file is configured with correct hostname i need to use (long one) can someone tell me how to do this ?
Thanks

Re: long Machine Name

bhavin asokan — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 05:57:24 GMT

hi,
the maximum length of a hostname is determined by MAXHOSTNAMELEN in /usr/include/sys/param.h. The default (on HPUX 11.11 ) is 64.
see the following links.it may solve your problem.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=364972

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=301546

regds,

Re: long Machine Name

Bill Hassell — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 08:19:45 GMT

There are two names for a Unix system Look at the man page for hostname and you'll see that uname is the UUCP name while hostname is used for modern TCP/IP networking. HP-UX is a standards-based system and uname must remain consistent with the standards. uname is defined as an 8-character (max) name as stated in the man page for hostname. Once a standard is changed, all sorts of problems with compatibility start showing up (can you say Windows?). Each man page documents the applicable standard(s) at the bottom.

Now hostname is limited to 64 characters but nodename (the value reported by uname) is limited to 8 characters. BOTH can be set by editing the /etc/rc.conig.d/netconf file and entering separate values for HOSTNAME and NODENAME:

HOSTNAME=max8char
NODENAME=maximum64characternames

The NODENAME value is what is used for LAN connections. If only HOSTNAME exists then NODENAME is set to HOSTNAME.

Re: long Machine Name

Stuart Abramson — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 08:12:20 GMT

My experience has been that for practical matters, you just DON'T want to have long hostnames. Things start to NOT WORK, like for example swinstall -s verylonghostname:/depot just completely breaks down.

I NEVER do it.

Re: long Machine Name

Geoff Wild — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 09:02:39 GMT

See this recent post:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=780354

As I mention there, alias the long name in DNS, but keep the real hostname at 8 characters.

Rgds...Geoff

Re: long Machine Name

Bill Hassell — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 13:02:59 GMT

OOPS...big correction. I reversed the names for HOSTNAME and NODENAME. It should read as follows:

> NODENAME=max8char
> HOSTNAME=maximum64characternames

>The HOSTNAME value is what is used for LAN connections. If only HOSTNAME exists then NODENAME is set to HOSTNAME.

So the hostname command can return a long name while uname -n will show the value of NODENAME from the startup script. Some sysadmins will set HOSTNAME to a fully qualified domain name (ie, bigfoot.sasquatch.net) which works for most environments but can break some scripts...and the startup script actually removes everything to the right starting with the first dot:

> uname -S ${HOSTNAME%%.*}

Re: long Machine Name

Rick Garland — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 13:27:10 GMT

Don't forget about the scripts you are going to write or want to run.

My experience has been that long hostnames create more confusion and forgetfulness.
(What was the name of that system that has 64 characters in its name?)