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change hostname

W

whytenoiz

Lurker
Does android provide the ability to change the hostname of the phone.

E.g. when dsa keys are generated by dropbear for rsync, they contain the identity 'rsync@android'. This presents a problem where there are multiple android devices backing up to the same server. Call it a case of mistaken identity?

Simple fix is to correct the hostnames on each phone (identical to the specs below)

Droid X on Verizon
2.2.1 (2.3.340)

TIA
 
Welcome to the Android Forums!

I'm not familiar with a way to change the hostname of a DX out of the box. My initial guess is that this would require root access to the phone.
 
I would answer that with the very concept of a forum such as this, where users are not content to simply drink the 'koolaid-for-the-masses' but rather strive to coax a device into conforming to their needs. I understand your point of view, I simply disagree with it. I do however, appreciate your assistance.
 
whytenoiz said:
I would answer that with the very concept of a forum such as this, where users are not content to simply drink the 'koolaid-for-the-masses' but rather strive to coax a device into conforming to their needs. I understand your point of view, I simply disagree with it. I do however, appreciate your assistance.
Click to expand...


There are lots of different flavors of koolaid my friend...

In doing a Google search it looks like a similar request has already been submitted to Google...

Issue 6111 - android - Allow a hostname to be specified - Project Hosting on Google Code

You may want to go in and Star this issue. The more stars the better chance of Google doing something about it.
 
Martimus said:
Maybe but I wonder how many smartphone owners want to change their hostname?
Click to expand...


All of them? All my computers have names, all of my sony erricson phones had names - since you could just set it. But apparently some idiot at google decided that android phones shouldn't have names.
 
Just thought I'd add to this discussion that I also came here looking for a way to set the hostname on my android device.

I wouldn't say that all users will want to change or set the hostname. Most mobile phone users are just that; users. Nothing more. All they want to do is use their phone, they don't care about any of the complex settings and they don't care how their phone works on the network. All they care is that they can use it.

But I agree, it should be possible to change the hostname for more advanced users.

Brian
 
as someone who administers a network that has android devices connected to it I would find it very helpful to be able to modify the hostnames on the various smartphones

modifying the hostname is an extremely basic and necessary ability in any networked environment

:cool:
 
Martimus said:
Maybe but I wonder how many smartphone owners want to change their hostname?
Click to expand...

I stumbled on this as you don't see this many posts in intro very often. I have seen many requests from users here about changing hostnames and haven't found a good answer.

At one point I had seven android devices connected to my router and I use mac address filtering. When I gave one away, I wanted to disallow it access to my home network. It was a little tedious to find it by mac address. If it just said "Wife Old Droid" it would have been far simpler. I can't imagine the difficulty in an enterprise environment that may have hundreds or thousands and android devices.

Folks want to do it for a variety of reasons from enterprise network deployment and management to simply managing what devices are connected to their home router.
 
In my case the ability to change the Android hostname on my phone is preventing me from setting a DHCP reservation for it on my DHCP server (router) because the standard hostname is something like android_f7s89f8ir78etywt which is too long for the router to understand.

I wish I could just rename the phone to something simple like phone1.
 
If you are rooted, you probably can do this. I have only tested it with the terminal emulator app, but it does seem to work.

Code: 
su
hostname
(current name)
hostname evo
hostname
evo
??? seems to work, not sure if works for the router and dhcp though...
 
Example, you may wish to setup the device by name in various configuration tables or scripts on your pc or network so you can connect to it by name.

Handy if you have several phones, for instance.
 
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