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Accepted
Marc Riera
Asked: 2009-11-04 03:48:05 +0800 CST

How to change the hostname at the end of pxe unattended installation on Debian

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I just installed a pxe server, and i'm installing debian with pxe . completely unattended with preseeding.

Now, all my installations come with the same hostname, how I can change the hostname to something different?

Thanks.

debian

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    One simple way that comes to mind without setting up things in DHCP.

    Assuming there is a web site you can add files to. Place the hostname inside a file based on the Mac. Then retrieve it with wget.

    e.g.:

    mac=`ifconfig eth0 | grep HWaddr | sed 's/^.*HWaddr //; s/://g'`
wget -O hostname.txt http://www.example.com/$mac
hostname `cat hostname.txt`

    The mac file name would be in lower case with no colon (:) characters.

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  2. Yeah, setting the hostname on preseeded installs is a bit of a pest, because even when you preseed the hostname on the kernel command line, the DNS reverse lookup during DHCP configuration overwrites it and you're stuck with it.

    The way I handle it is by building a custom initrd with a local udeb I whipped up, that provides a question you can preseed to the FQDN of the machine.

    Alternately, after the install's done just change /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts to the name of the new host and reboot. That's all that's required to effect a name change on a minimal install.

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