New SL6 system: No hostname?

Question

This is in regards to Scientific Linux 6.1 system, but should also apply to CentOS 6.1 & RHEL 6.1.

I am setting up a new Scientific Linux 6.1 system, using kickstart and DHCP (via xCAT). This machine should be named `'host2.example.org'.

I see that some programs are unable to resolving the hostname of this system.

It seems that RedHat 6 no longer puts a hostname into /etc/hosts (See bug 668830 and RedHat KB DOC-57321 (login required)). In addition, the hostname is not defined in /etc/sysconfig/network.

# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6
# cat /etc/sysconfig/network
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain
# hostname
host2
# hostname --long
hostname: Host name lookup failure

I was expecting to see the hostname in /etc/sysconfig/network , but it's not there. Shouldn't something (like NetworkManager) put the hostname into a file somewhere? If so, why is there no HOSTNAME line in my /etc/sysconfig/network? Should Kickstart or Anaconda do this?

For CentOS/SL 5.6, I believe the hostname was always added to /etc/hosts.

Answer 1

I also had this problem -- SL6.2 didn't set the hostname correctly at boot, which prevented all sorts of things from working. I finally changed this line in /etc/sysconfig/network to specify the desired host.domain name instead of "localhost.localdomain":

HOSTNAME=localhost.localdomain

That seems to do the trick. I won't bother to try to find out why this is not done automagically during installation....