change hostname on Cisco devices that are in production

[jaimegorum]

I'm new to Cisco devices and to my current job as network analyst. Mostly in an attempt to establish consistency and to ease identification, I'd like to change the hostname of most of our Cisco switches and routers. However, I don't want to create any other problems.

If I proceed with the hostname change on our Cisco devices that are in production, would there be any negative impact that I may expect?

Thanks in advance!

[Jon Marshall]

Hi

Couple of things spring to mind

1) DNS resolution. How do you resolve the hostnames for your routers/switches now ?. if you do it via DNS then you need to update it to reflect the new name.

2) Any scripts etc. that you may use to automate taks on your network may need updating although if they use DNS to resolev just see 1

3) SSH. If you are using SSH to manage your routers/switches and you change the hostname the ssh key will become invalid. You will need to regenerate the key.

HTH

Jon

[srue]

DNS doesn't matter (aside from consistency). Your device hostname as configured using the hostname command can be 'switch', and you can have it configured completely differently in DNS.

The biggest problem would be SSH i think, as jon pointed at in #3.

[sriggslev]

granted dns ties a name to an IP but wouldnt it be wise to name the switch the same as the dns name...