Fedora 18 and Host Name Dashes

I ran into an interesting problem today when installing the newly released Fedora 18. It was quite annoying, so I wanted to document it here.

Using the new installer, I configured my computer’s host name to subdomain.domain.com on the network setup page. After I finished the installation, I noticed my host name was still the default localhost.localdomain. I tried the usual tricks to set the host name, but all the following tactics failed:

• /etc/sysconfig/network by setting HOSTNAME=subdomain.domain.com
• Using the hostname subdomain.domain.com command.
• Changing the System Settings > Details > Device name field.

I was able to get the host name set, but instead of subdomain.domain.com, the host name was displayed as subdomain-domain-com. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the correct host name.

It turns out, there’s a new place to configure your host name in Fedora 18. Just edit the /etc/hostname file, add your host name, and restart your computer. Simple as that.

Update: Several readers have pointed out the hostnamectl utility. Using this tool, you can set the host name properly on a Fedora 18 system. The syntax for this change is:

hostnamectl set-hostname subdomain.domain.com