Why doesn't CrOS have a hostname?

[Zentaro Kavanagh]

Was the reason that CrOS doesn't have a hostname just that it we didn't think it was needed and just KISS?

Or were there technical reasons why we intentionally don't allow it to have a hostname?

If there were no technical reasons, would we be open making it optionally settable?

It always frustrates me that on a router/switch you can't tell which Chromebooks are which from the DHCP leases unless you maintain your own mapping to a MAC address. I imagine it must be even more frustrating in a large enterprise with lots of them.

Even most network connected consumer electronics (tv/roku/etc) let you set the hostname for this reason even though they don't need it for any technical reason.

[Kevin Cernekee]

Some recent discussion here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=676195

[Steven Bennetts]

Discussed here:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=126802

On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 10:10 AM, 'Zentaro Kavanagh' via Chromium OS dev <chromiu...@chromium.org> wrote:

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[Bill Spurlin]

I was able to get my Chromium OS (cloudready 74.4.58 (Developer Build - neverware) stable-channel chromeover64) device to have a hostname and send the hostname via dhcp/ddns to update my local zone file.  Steps:

1.  Make the root partition read-write, i. e. "mount -o remount,rw /" as root.

2. Create the directory /etc/chromium/policies/managed .  See   https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/enterprise/adding-new-policies   and https://www.chromium.org/administrators/linux-quick-start .

3. Create a file, e. g.  /etc/chromium/policies/managed/1.policy with the extension "policy" and contents:

{

     "DeviceHostnameTemplate": "<your hostname>"

}

see https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#DeviceHostnameTemplate

4.  Test the policy with chrome://policy

5.  Create a file /etc/hostname with contents <your hostname> .

6.  Append the line "hostname -F /etc/hostname" to /usr/share/cros/init/shill-pre-start.sh .

7.  Restart,   you may see a "chronos@<your hostname> at a crosh->shell prompt, and on your dhcp server (ISC) you will see your hostname in the output of "dhcp-lease-list"

Hope this works for you.

Discussed here:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=126802

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