Bug 76102

Summary:	hostnamectl set-hostname destroys /etc/machine-info
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Brian "Redbeard" Harrington <brian.harrington>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	minor
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Brian "Redbeard" Harrington 2014-03-13 08:09:25 UTC

While doing some work in trying ensure hostnames get set correctly on CoreOS I found that running hostnamectl set-hostname would destroy the file /etc/machine-info.

In this case the hostname "host-10-0-0-7" is the hostname assigned via DHCP.  The file /etc/machine-info was created by hand and the system was subsequently rebooted.


[bharrington@leviathan-alticon-net coreos]$ ssh 192.168.1.202
Warning: Permanently added '192.168.1.202' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
Last login: Thu Mar 13 00:55:57 UTC 2014 from 192.168.1.63 on pts/1
   ______                ____  _____
  / ____/___  ________  / __ \/ ___/
 / /   / __ \/ ___/ _ \/ / / /\__ \
/ /___/ /_/ / /  /  __/ /_/ /___/ /
\____/\____/_/   \___/\____//____/
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ 
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ 
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ 
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ cat /etc/machine-info 
PRETTY_HOSTNAME=coreos-2.coreos.lab
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ sudo hostnamectl set-hostname coreos-1.coreos.lab
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ cat /etc/machine-info 
cat: /etc/machine-info: No such file or directory
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ hostname
coreos-1.coreos.lab
core@host-10-0-0-7 ~ $ cat /etc/hostname 
coreos-1.coreos.lab

Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2014-03-13 19:08:18 UTC

"systemctl set-hostname" sets all three hostnames by default. If you want to set only the pretty, or only the transient, or only the static one use switches like --pretty, --transient, --static. You can even combine them...

"systemctl set-hostname" will set all three names, then detect that there's no point in keeping the pretty name in place if it is char-for-char identical with the static one, and simply removes the file since there's nothing else in there. 

So, this is intended operation. And explained in the man page...

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