When I installed Solaris 10 x86, my computer thought its hostname was unknown. Aside from being annoying, this seemed to be causing a few issues, so I set about trying to set it to a name of my choice.

Using the uname -S hostname command set the hostname for me but this information didn’t persist on reboot. A bit of googling turned up various references to editing /etc/init.d/network so that it read /etc/nodename and set the hostname accordingly (as well as a script to set the hostname), but my system didn’t have an /etc/nodename file.

I understood that /etc/nodename should contain my computer’s name, but didn’t know if any other settings were required (I later found Jeff Hunter’s TCP/IP quick configuration guide, which confirmed that the file just contains the computer’s name – in my case laptop3).

It turns out that these hacks are for Solaris 8/9 – Solaris 10 is quite happy to set the hostname based on the contents of /etc/nodename. Once I had created /etc/nodename and rebooted, /etc/hosts read:

#
# Internet host table
#
127.0.0.1 localhost
192.168.7.106 laptop3 # Added by DHCP

and the computer was no longer anonymous!