Valid hostnames

[H_16]

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

US-APP-LIVE01

[Pete Randall]

Do a man on uname and on hostname.


Pete

[Pete Randall]

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

[Dennis Handly]

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

[VK2COT]

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

[Bob E Campbell · Accepted solution]

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.

[VK2COT]

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