How To Change CentOS Server/Host Hostname? – POFTUT

How To Change CentOS Server/Host Hostname?

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Host name is used to identify the systems like hosts, clients, servers etc. Host name provides human readable easy names to remember. In a big environment host names will provides some easy of use. This tutorial is compatible with  RHEL6, RHEL7, Fedora, CentOS 6 and CentOS 7 versions

How Host Names Works

In basic form computer networks like TCP/IP works with IP addresses to communicate. IP addresses are not practical for remember and usage. So we name hosts with host names where these host names are associated with related IP address. In the following example we associate host name web1 with IP address 192.168.122.10

192.168.122.10   web1

For more detailed host naming with fully qualified domain name read following tutorials.

What is FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) with Examples?

Change Host Name In Network Config File

One way to change CentOS server host name is editing the network config file. CentOS network config file resides in /etc/sysconfig/network . We will open this file with out favourite editor which is vi in this example. Also we need root privileges in order to edit and save network config file.

$ vi /etc/sysconfig/network

and we will add following line or change if it exists. In this example we will set HOSTNAME configuration to poftut3

HOSTNAME=poftut3
Change Host Name In Network Config File
Change Host Name In Network Config File

In order to apply new host name we need to restart network services with the following command.

$ systemctl restart network

Change Host Name with hostname Command

We have all ready examined the hostname command which is used to change and set hostname of fully qualified domain name. We can simply specify the new host name after hostname command. In this example we will set host name as poftut5 . This will require root privileges

$ hostname poftut5
Change Host Name with hostname Command
Change Host Name with hostname Command

Add Host Name and Associated IP Address To Hosts File

After changing CentOS host name we should also set new host name and IP address associated in the local system and other systems. We will add host name and IP address to the /etc/hosts file like below. This will also require root privileges too.

192.168.122.10 poftut3

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