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With the rise of virtualizing physical hardware, many of you are changing the naming conventions in the process.

This has led to a spike in issues relating to how to truly change the hostname, across the whole of the ITM infrastructure.

This blog shows you a quick and simple way to change the name that reports into ITM and the names used for all of the CLI in one easy step.

 

 

 

 

 

How to Change the hostnames:

There are a few rules you need to follow to make sure this works seamlessly!

RULE 1: You MUST add two parameters to each of the agents environment/configuration file for the change to be reflected in all aspects in ITM

RULE 2: You MUST change all of the agents names on the same host machine or you will hit problems with CLI and remote actions (change all agents to the exact same name on each system)

 

The two parameters needed:

As mentioned you need to set TWO parameters and there is good reason for this....

 

The first 

CTIRA_HOSTNAME  -  This changes the hostname displayed in the Managed System Status workspace and also in the output of the tacmd listSystems command

 

 

If you do add both parameters and set the value to exactly the same name on each.... you will have problems and mismatching between names in different parts of ITM. I have seen this happen, it is not fun, so save yourself a headache and set both to begin with!!!

 

 

Where to set the parameters:

 

For Windows based agents:

 

1) Edit the <ITMHOME>\TMAITM6\kxxcma.ini file to include:

XX is the two letter product code of the agent you wish to change

 

2) Add the parameters if they are not present and then change the <hostname> part to be the exact same hostname for both values.
CTIRA_HOSTNAME=<hostname> .TYPE=REG_EXPAND_SZ
CTIRA_SYSTEM_NAME=<hostname>

 

3) Reconfigure the agent through the MTEMS

4) Start the agent

 

 

For Unix/Linux based agents:

 

1) You will need to add the parameters to the xx.ini file, where xx is the product code of the agent. 

XX is the two letter product code of the agent you wish to change

 

2) Add or update the parameters below:
CTIRA_HOSTNAME=<your hostname>
CTIRA_SYSTEM_NAME=<your hostname>

 

3) Reconfigure the agent

 

4) Restart the agent

 

 

Other points to note:

TIP:  Before you start the process above. Stop the agent and remove the offline entry from the TEPS managed system status workspace. This step will remove old agent name from the TEMS database.

This means when you start the agent again with the changed name you dont have any left over old entries in the TEPS. The reason its worth doing before you make the change is that its vry easy when doing this in batch to forget which systems you have changed. You will then be left in the state of trying to work out which offline agents are truly offline, or if they are the agents you have changed