When I create a new Linode VPS and install Ubuntu in it, the hostname is set to 'ubuntu'. This means that somebody who understands Linux configuration needs to change the hostname by hand. It would be much more useful if /etc/hostname were set to some suitable FQDN, such as 'li22-125.members.linode.com' or so.

We currently script the initial rollout of our new sites so that the site can be created by somebody without much technical knowledge. This saves on costs and keeps me (or somebody else who knows the guts of Linux) from being the organization bottleneck. So I go around looking for things that could reasonably be automated. One feature of our current rollout script on our current server is that each VPS is initially configured to have an FQDN that works fine from the public network. This allows use of a web interface as soon as the VPS is created. Eventually when the customer site goes live somebody edits the configuration but this is done at some scheduled convenient time so is not such a big hit to our scarce resources.

Thanks in advance -- Walt