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Setting the hostname
During installation, you were asked to create a hostname for your server. 
Specifically, the field was labeled 
Your server's name
 during the initial setup 
process. At that time, our goal was to simply get an Ubuntu Server installation set 
up for working through the examples in this book. At this point, you may consider 
changing the hostname of your server. When we utilize OpenSSH to remotely 
manage our servers (as we'll do later on in this chapter) the hostname is shown on 
the command line. That can be very confusing if all servers have the same name. 
More importantly, the hostname of a server gives it an identity. When it comes 
to real production deployments of Ubuntu Server, each individual server should 
have its own designated purpose, and be named accordingly. Often, organizations 
will have their own naming scheme. Perhaps web servers in a company are named 
similar to 
webserver-01
, or with a fully qualified domain name, such as 
server1.
mydomain.com
.
In this book, I won't assume any particular naming scheme, so when we do work 
through changing the hostname, feel free to adjust the name as you see fit. If you 
don't have a naming scheme (but would like to create one) feel free to get creative. 
I've seen quite a few variations, from naming servers after cartoon characters (who 
wouldn't want a server named 
daffy-duck
?), to Greek gods or goddesses. Some 
companies choose to be a bit boring and come up with naming schemes consisting 
of a series of characters separated by hyphens, with codes representing which rack 
the server is in, as well as its purpose. You can create your own naming convention if 
you haven't already, and no matter what you come up with, I won't judge you.
As I mentioned, the hostname of your server is its identity. It identifies your server 
to the rest of the network. While a simple hostname, such as 
ubuntu
, is fine if you 
have just one host, it would get confusing really quickly if you kept the default on 
every Ubuntu Server within your network. Giving each server a descriptive name 
helps you tell them apart from each other. But there's more to a server's name than 
its hostname, which we'll get into in 
Chapter 11
, 
Setting Up Network Services
, when 
we discuss DNS. But for now, we'll work through viewing and configuring the 
hostname, so you'll be ready to make your hostname official with a DNS assignment, 
when we come to it.

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Chapter 10