Open the /etc/sysconfig/network file with your favorite text editor. Modify the HOSTNAME= value to match your FQDN host name.

# nano /etc/sysconfig/network
HOSTNAME=myserver.domain.com

Change the host that is associated to your main IP address for your server, this is for internal networking (found at /etc/hosts):

nano /etc/hosts
192.xx.xx.xx myserver.domain.com

Hostname

The ‘hostname’ command will let you change the hostname on the server that the commandline remembers, but it will not actively update all programs that are running under the old hostname.

# hostname myserver.domain.com
# hostname
myserver.domain.com

Restart Networking

At this point all the necessary changes that needed to be made have been made, you will want to restart networking on your server to make sure that changes will be persistent on reboot:

# /etc/init.d/network restart

* Hostname reports nothing

# hostname

Try this

$ stat /bin/hostname
File: `/bin/hostname'
Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
Device: 803h/2051d Inode: 40616045 Links: 1
Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2015-03-13 05:10:01.000000000 -0700
Modify: 2014-12-15 15:33:57.000000000 -0700
Change: 2014-12-15 15:33:57.000000000 -0700

Notice the “empty file”
Reinstall the package – the package it’s included in (net-tools-1.60-110.el6_2.x86_64).

Now Check

# stat /bin/hostname
  File: `/bin/hostname'
  Size: 17848           Blocks: 40         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d    Inode: 269246      Links: 1
Access: (0755/-rwxr-xr-x)  Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2015-03-13 04:47:35.065993289 -0600
Modify: 2012-05-10 03:17:33.000000000 -0500
Change: 2015-01-30 03:29:41.959201490 -0600