Is there a difference between droplet name and ubuntu hostname?

October 18, 2016 1.7k views
DigitalOcean Ubuntu Ubuntu 16.04
davidkohcw
By:
davidkohcw

So I recently renamed my droplet to a new name via DigitalOcean’s control panel, however I realized that my ubuntu hostname that I see at my command line did not update.

I did some searching on the forums and it appears that I have to manually reconfigure my server to change the hostname. The question I have is that is it perfectly fine to have one name on my Digital Ocean server and another name for its hostname? And if that’s the case, what is the use of the digital ocean droplet name and hostname if they can differ? Is the Digital Ocean droplet name just for convenience?

Sorry, still quite new to all this!

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1 Answer
ryanpq MOD December 22, 2016

Sorry for the confusion. Yes, there is no inherent issue in those names not matching. When you first create a droplet the name you choose is used as the initial hostname but our systems do not have any real access to the internals of your droplet once it’s launched (aside from the specialized case of the password reset tool).

Some services may expect the hostname to resolve or may run into problems but this should only be an issue if the hostname (not the droplet name in the control panel) is a fully qualified domain or subdomain name. In other circumstances having them different should be fine. When you set a name for your droplet in the control panel our system looks to see if the name you used is a FQDN (fully qualified domain name) and if it is, it uses that name to populate a reverse DNS (PTR) record so lookups of your IP address will return that name.

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