I’ve been brushing up on a few technologies in my home lab, and have found myself using VMware workstation for some simple tasks that don’t require a whole virtualized environment. Workstation didn’t set the hostname of my Ubuntu 18.xx VMs properly after they booted. Maybe I’m a little spoiled by guest OS customization or missing something, but either way, I needed a way to quickly spin up a whole VM and have it’s hostname set correctly. It’s definitely not the cleanest, and I realize I would be better off using the Workstation Pro REST API, but I’m not there yet.
We can do this pretty easily by adding a script to the /etc/profile.d directory. The script I’m currently using is below:
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#!/bin/bash #file /etc/profile.d/VirtJunkie.com-set_hostname.sh FLAG="/var/log/firstboot.flag" if [ ! -f $FLAG ]; then echo "Server will reboot after this process completes" echo -n "Current hostname is $(hostname). Enter the new hostname and press [ENTER]: " read newhostname sudo hostnamectl set-hostname $newhostname #the next line creates an empty file so it won't run the next boot sudo touch $FLAG sudo reboot now fi |
Just modify your parent image, clone your test VMs, and this will prompt you to set a new hostname the first time you log in.
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