Can we set easy-to-remember hostnames for EC2 instances?

Question

I\'m running a couple of standard Fedora instances on EC2. I feel the public hostnames of the instances assigned by Amazon are too weird and hard to remember. I\'d like to chang

Answer 1

From this site:

Change the hostname on a running system

On any Linux system you can change its hostname with the command hostname (surprised?)… Here are some quick usages of the command line hostname:

$> hostname

without any parameter it will output the current hostname of the system.

$> hostname --fqd

it will output the fully qualified domain name (or FQDN) of the system.

$> hostname NEW_NAME

will set the hostname of the system to NEW_NAME.

You can also edit /etc/hostname (at least on Ubuntu).

To make sure it stays after a reboot in AWS, either add the command in /etc/rc.local so it runs when the machine starts.

There's also a way to set the hostname dynamically via USER_DATA :

USER_DATA=`/usr/bin/curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/user-data`
HOSTNAME=`echo $USER_DATA`
IPV4=`/usr/bin/curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4`
hostname $HOSTNAME
echo $HOSTNAME > /etc/hostname