Lately, I’ve been crossing paths with too many enterprise-level server products that, once installed, can’t tolerate any change to the local machine’s hostname.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not spoiled to dare wishing that a hostname change will be handle in run-time, without a restart. I’m not even suggesting that the change would be automatically detected and processed on the next product restart. I much more modest that that, Just having a documented working procedure on how to do that offline would make me a happy man. The current, glum, state of affairs is that some products would have to be completely re-installed if the hostname were to change.

hostname

Some of the reasons for changing a machine’s hostname might be:
(1) You want to clone a new server from a, best practiced already installed, server template, each cloned copy should have a unique computer name (very useful in test environments, especially handy when making a vm duplicate of a template virtual machine).
(2) You have an existing server which changed its business role – you plan to install a  new application module (EAR), but want to keep the existing middleware infrastructure (JEE AS).
(3) You no longer want the server to be reachable by it’s original name (without making use of DNS administration, and aliases tricks).
(4) You want to implement a new server naming convention in your production environment.

Now Programmers, how hard can it be to live in peace with a dynamic hostname?
(1) If you are sure that the target network resource is the local machine then just use the localhost loopback interface instead of a hostname, when addressing it.
(2) Query the OS when retrieving the machine’s hostname, instead of relying on static, sometimes binary, stale, configuration files.
(3) Keep all application network resources is a centralized configuration repository. Provide an offline API for the admin to access it.

As a side note:
IBM WAS ND 6.X now has, a long awaited, offline API for updating the hostname of a machine.
If you know and care about other products that support or don’t support hostname updates, please place your comment.