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!
I had a similar problem getting the hostname set using DHCP. After a lot of reading, snooping, and pleading with my sysadmin, I finally found this solution:
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4554/6maoq020t?a=view
Please note that step 4 is crucial
Alan Thompson
Thanks Alan, that worked a treat! I’ve used your tip to write a new post on configuring a Solaris 10 DHCP client to register with a Windows Server 2003 DNS server.
Alan,
I think the URL you meant was http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4554/6maoq020m?a=view which is the page before the one you linked to.
regards
grant
Thank you very much for the quick fix solution. This has helped my configure my x86 machine a lot faster than what i expected.
– Abhishek
Just take a look at this guys tag cloud – Solaris 10 hosted in VMware Fusion and I get the goods from a guy who advertises himself as a “Microsoft Exchange Server, Active Directory and the Windows platform” specialist. Thanks Mark (and Google:), drop us a line if you’re ever down-under.
Andrew – glad you found it useful… and even though it’s a sunny day in England, I’d rather be down under right now :-) Mark
Mark – I have installed Solaris 10 on a spark box, and I am now trying to get email and calendar to work from the company’s exchange server. No such luck. I have been playing arounf with various settings, but cannot git it to successfully logon using my LDAP/domain password, I am sure you have experience & Doco regarding this…
@Solarisnovis – I gave up on Solaris x86 as I found too many things worked differently to other Unix distros and I focused my Unix attentions on Linux instead. It’s a bit off-topic and I don’t know the full answer to your problem but I do have some ideas that might help:
Once you’ve got the authentication working, you may find that your Unix mail client needs POP3 or IMAP4 to be enabled on the Exchange Server (these normally disabled in a corporate environment in favour of HTTP/S or Oulook’s MAPI transport).
HTH, Mark
Does this similar issue happen for the sparc version also ?
thanks buddy, i had this issue and almost gave up changing the numerous files but nothing got me to work. Your post did the trick.
thanks so much. great info
Many thanks Mark! That helped me tremendously. Thanks so much again!