[ProgSoc] automagically setting/changing linux hostname on a heap of machines

victor rajewski askvictor at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 17:31:58 EST 2008


Hi all,

I've just successfully set up a dual-boot system on the lab computers
at the school I teach at. We are using ghost solution suite for
imaging the computers, which does a reasonable job of changing the
computer's name and re-joining it to the domain under Windows. I need
similar functionality for the shiny new linux partition (sans domain)
- I need some way of setting the host name in each machine. AFAIK
ghost doesn't have this functionality in-built, and even if it did it
would be tricky to access as the machines boot into windows by default
(via grub) - ghost would either need to modify the grub setup each
time, or change the image on the fly before it is sent to each machine
(thus ruling out multicasting).

Has anyone had any similar problems with suitable solutions? Is there
any way to auto-configure the hostname via dhcp? The other alternative
I was considering was to create a map of MAC addresses (or something
else unique to each machine) to hostnames which sits in a file on
every machine that sets the hostname at startup, but this seems a
little inelegant.

ciao

vik


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