Hi,

Our local school has a 100 % Slackware Linux network with two servers and 14 desktop clients.

The main server is running Dnsmasq, and he's providing static IP addresses to the desktop clients. Hostnames are also managed centrally.

All client machines only have this in /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

And in /etc/HOSTNAME:

localhost.localdomain

The hostname gets sent to each of the desktop clients by the server. The big advantage is I can manage everything centrally from the server. One line in /etc/dnsmasq.conf, and that's it. Client installs can all be cloned with Ghost4Linux.

Now I'm trying to do the same thing on CentOS 7.

/etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost (IPv6 is disabled)

/etc/hostname:

localhost

I'm experimenting with all this while reading the RHEL Networking Guide. I understand CentOS 7 is using hostnamectl to manage the hostname.

In that case, what do I have to do? Can hostnamectl be somewhat disabled and/or removed?

Cheers,

Niki