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View Full Version : Knoppix messed up my suse distribution



donharter
12-19-2006, 11:40 AM
I used Knoppix as a rescue CD and now my suse system has a Knoppix login prompt after boot.
I have looked everywhere that I know and cannot find out how that is done.
I have reinstalled grub. I suspect that maybe my initrd file might have been modified, but that seems unlikely.
I had found some xauth entries for the Knoppix hostname and deleted them. It seems that my hostname gets set to Knoppix sonehow.
Here is the prompt that I get for loging:
"Welcome to Suse .........
Knoppix login:"
I checked some of the config files for login and I did not find "Knoppix" in any of them.
My dhclient.leases file has the following entry
"option host-name "Knoppix";"
That seems to be set because the HOSTNAME shell variable is set to Knoppix somehow.

avdongen
12-20-2006, 12:15 PM
Hi,
My first guess is that knoppix gave a hostname to the dhcp server when it got the lease, and suse doesn't. So suse gets the hostname from the previous lease, which is remembered by your dhcp server. To verify this hypothesis, you can unplug your network cable and reboot suse. It will probably come up without a hostname or the one you set up initially.

If you want to change it back, use the suse tools to set the hostname (I don't have suse system at hand so I don't know the exact commands. It must be something like "hostname mynewname" but you should check that). I expect that this will override the hostname retrieved from the dhcp server.

If you're the only one using this dhcp server then it is also an option to clear its configuration. How that is done depends on the server. If the dhcp server is a sophisticated one, you could also set up a reservation for your system (based on MAC address), including the hostname you want to assign to it. But that hostname will be applied to all OS-es running on it, if the OS accepts it.

HTH,
Arthur

donharter
12-21-2006, 02:54 AM
OK Thanks. I think I have found the cause. dhclient uses previous leases.
In the /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.leases file, I have found some leases with a Knoppix hostname.
I will delete them, but I wonder how it got changed. I was using Knoppix as a rescue disk to backup a hard drive.
{reviously I never found such a file since I was only searcing the /etc directory tree.

:D

Harry Kuhman
12-21-2006, 03:22 AM
I will delete them, but I wonder how it got changed.
Read the post by avdongen again, he hit it dead on. Knoppix did not make the change. It just took out the lease with your DHCP server. Suse then found out about the lease when it was rebooted and it made the change itself. If you want to avoid this in the future see if you can't change the settings in youir dhcp server to make the lease shorter and wait out the lease before booting back into Suse, or just release the lease in Knoppix before shutting down.

donharter
12-22-2006, 03:38 PM
Just deleting the dhcp.leases file did not work. I think when I shutdown the system a script wrote out the current information again which had Knoppix as the host name.
I ran "dhclient -r eth0" and then emptied the dhcp.leases file. I opened up a text login window and could see that the Knoppix hostname was gone.

You are saying that the comcast dhcp server stored my "Knoppix" hostname and returned it to me in a dhcp request after I rebooted and requested a new lease.

:)