This post is really more of a note to myself as I’m sure I’ll be doing this again. But hopefully someone else will stumble upon this and find it useful :).

I have a VPS hosted on Rackspace running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server edition. I wanted to change the hostname as I originally named it the name of the application I was working on, but I’m now planning on using it for multiple things. I wanted the name to be more generic.

Step 1. Type in the following command.

sudo hostname newhostname

Step 2. Edit the /etc/hostname file and replace the text there with the new hostname and save it.

sudo vi /etc/hostname

Step 3. Edit the /etc/hosts file and replace the old hostname references to the new hostname, then save it.

sudo vi /etc/hosts

Step 4. Logout and log back in

It will now show user@newhostname in the command prompt, typing hostname will now show the new hostname, and pinging the new hostname will resolve to something.

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