Wrap your lines, please... Paul Irofti wrote: > I have changed one of my workstation's IP with: > > $ sudo ifconfig vr0 inet 192.168.1.64 > > Afterwards some applications (trn, rtorrent, gaim) acknowledged the > change and worked on the fly. Others, such as irssi, worked on a > random basis (i.e. restarting it would lead to connecting or not to > the servers). Firefox, mutt, snownews, lynx didn't even bother. > > I did modify the /etc/hostname.vr0 and /etc/hosts files before > executing the command. > > I couldn't find any solution to this. Is it something I'm missing? > I felt pretty dumb having to reboot my machine in order to solve > this.
Why's that? Ok, sure, we laugh our selves silly about everything we do in Windows requiring a reboot, however, it is easy to forget, sometimes (in fact, often!) one really SHOULD reboot a machine. I've seen this happen way too often, and done it a few times myself: 1) Make changes "on the fly" 2) Change config files 3) ...do nothing...for months... 4) reboot the server 5) Find out the changes done in step 2 were done improperly...or forgotten to be done. 6) Spend way too long trying to restore proper operation, as you no longer recall the "what" or the " If you reconfigure a machine, you need to reboot it to make sure you didn't fat-finger something in the process, and make sure it comes up on its own, even if you aren't doing that right this moment. Yeah, that hurts your "uptime". That's ok, uptime is only significant to people who come from a Windows background anyway...virtually every other OS (including MSDOS) ran from when you start them to when you shut them down (or until an app crashed 'em)...and proper maintenance requires shutting them down from time to time. The actual answer to your question as asked would require much more information about what you did and what actually happened, but I think your question is wrong, so this is the answer I'm giving you. Can you reconfig things on the fly? In theory, yes. Should you? No, at least if you aren't reading the script files to understand how it all works together, and even then, schedule that reboot SOON so you can check for fat-fingering... Nick.
