Re: Hostname questions

[Thomas O'Dowd <tom@example.com>]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2001 at 01:39:43AM -0000, Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:
> Starting a new thread since the topic has moved (rightly so) from Apache 
> troubles to hostname questions.
> 
> I just edited /etc/sysconfig/network and added
> 
> HOSTNAME=linux

If this was all you did, then it won't effect anything until a) you 
reboot or b) you invoke a network script or start script that uses
that value.

> I tried opening a new shell (using the Gnome) but no terminal comes up. For 
> my education why is this?

I'm assuming you selected a launcher or menu item. Switch to the console
ctrl-alt-F1 to see the error message? ctrl-alt-F7 to come back. If you
have a terminal open already, try typing gnome-terminal on the cmd line.
There are many reasons it won't come up. Give us an error message to
work with...

> I'm sure if I reboot this problem will go away, but I was under the 
> impression that Linux only needed to be rebooted for *major* changes.

When you make a system change you usually don't need to reboot to get
it to work with linux, but you *should* reboot to test your changes
work cleanly after a reboot especially on production boxes. Why? Because
linux stays up for a long time sometime, imagine, you reboot a year later,
to move the machine, or the machine goes down in the middle of the night
6 months later and doesn't come back up cleanly. It's much easier to 
trouble shoot why knowning you just made a change to file x, rather than
well, a year ago somebody changed something *maybe* and didn't test the
change with a reboot. I've had to try to solve too many wierd problems
because of this to know the value of rebooting after a system change.

Oh and to answer your question above, you don't *need* to reboot for a 
problem to go away, you should be able to solve it without the reboot.

Tom.
-- 
Thomas O'Dowd. - Nooping - http://nooper.com
tom@example.com - Testing - http://nooper.co.jp/labs