In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the hostname on your CentOS 7. For those of you who didn’t know, Hostname is a label that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network and that is used to identify the device in various forms of electronic communication. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS.
The tutorial is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. If you are ready open up your terminal and follow through with this tutorial, and in less than 10 minutes you will have changed your hostname on a CentOS 7 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
Change Hostname on CentOS 7
Step 1. First I will check the current hostname by running “hostnamectl status” on the shell of my server:
hostnamectl status
The output on my system is:
[root@idroot ~]# hostnamectl status Static hostname: server1.example.com Icon name: computer-vm Chassis: vm Machine ID: d89865d34b5a4637a9a4ff0ce0f6da02 Boot ID: 56d1685056d743b39e57a7b9cbfe467c Virtualization: vmware Operating System: CentOS Linux 7 (Core) CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:centos:centos:7 Kernel: Linux 3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64 Architecture: x86_64
Step 2. Change and Set Hostname.
To change the hostname type the command:
hostnamectl set-hostname server2.example.com
Check the hostname again (Close the session and open a new session using the console):
[root@idroot ~]# hostnamectl status Static hostname: server2.example.com Icon name: computer-vm Chassis: vm Machine ID: d89865d34b5a4637a9a4ff0ce0f6da02 Boot ID: 56d1685056d743b39e57a7b9cbfe467c Virtualization: vmware Operating System: CentOS Linux 7 (Core) CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:centos:centos:7 Kernel: Linux 3.10.0-123.el7.x86_64 Architecture: x86_64
In each of these configurations, you’ll need to be sure your hostname conforms to the standards for FQDNs (Fully Qualified Domain Names). The ASCII letters a – z, the digits 0 – 9, and the hyphen (‘-‘) are the only characters acceptable (the first character, however, cannot be a hyphen). You may also find it necessary (or useful) to include the domain name as well, in which case you would then also use periods (dots) to separate the hostname and the domain name (and top-level domain).
Congratulations! You have successfully changed the hostname. Thanks for using this tutorial on how to change and set the hostname on your CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official CentOS website.
