Hi everyone,

I'm kinda new to linode and server stuff so I need some help to understand how to things.

I know I can set the host name to anything I want/like.
But the issue I'm having is that, I have 6 sites that I want to move from a shared hosting to my linode, while following instructions on Getting Started with Linode, I reached the part that talks about how to set the FQDN and here comes the confusion. The questions that I have and need help with are:

Does the FQDN have to be one of my domains? Or it could be any unreal domain like "whatever.whatever.com"?

Let's say my sites domains are:
firstdomain.com
seconddomain.com
thirddomain.com
forthdomain.com
fifthdomain.com
sixthdomain.com

- Do I have to set FQDN for each site/domain? Or setting it for only one domain will be enough for the other sites?

- If my host name was "xiang-ong", does the FQDN have to match the hostname and be the same? of the FQDN could be anything?
For example, does the FQDN has to be be "xiang-ong.firstdomain.com"? or it could be anything like "whatever.firstdomain.com"?

Generally you want to use a real domain. So, whatever.firstdomain.com, where firstdomain.com is the domain you want to use for your hostname.

For both my VPS' I registered new domain names exclusively for the VPS hostname. That way the management of the server is completely independent of whatever other domain(s) I host there.

Then I choose a subdomain (like "vps.domain.com") and use that for the hostname, so if I decide to actually make public use of the domain I bought (for "www") then there's still the option to do so later, and I can build my own private VPS home page (with monitoring scripts and other useful links) around the hostname with some password protection.

OK, thanks guys.
But I'm still confused about the FQDN. Do I have to set a FQDN for each domain/site in the host file? Or only ONE FQDN will be enough for the others?
And if one FQDN is enough, does it matter which domain I choose?

Just one Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for the server. Well technically you could have more, but for the purposes of that tutorial, you only need one.

I've done similar to haus. I purchased a domain purely for my own personal use. For this example, let's use call it example.com

I decided to call my server plato, this is just a name so you can remember it easily, just like your own local computer name that you probably never even need to use unless you have a network with multiple computers at home or at work. So my FQDN for my server would be plato.example.com

EDIT: You'll probably only ever use your FQDN when you connect to your server.

Oh and you don't need to go out and purchase an additional domain just for this purpose. You could just use an existing domain that you already own. It really just depends on how you want to organize your stuff.

So you mean it doesn't really matter which domain I use as my FQDN, any domain will do no matter how domains/sites I have, right?
Is there any cases I have to make more than one FQDN in the same VPS?

It really doesn't matter, so long as you own and control it. It's what you're going to refer to your server as.

OK guys, thank you so much.

Does anyone know if there are any cases that require to have more the one FQDNs in the same server?

Without going into the realm of highly-unlikely scenarios, no. Your fully-qualified hostname is the machine name followed by a domain, like:

machinename.mydomain.com

It has one full name, just like you do, which uniquely identifies it.

By chance you're not confusing your fully qualified host name with virtual hosts in Apache or other web servers, are you? You can give your VPS the hostname above and host a web site with a completely different document root under "www.mydomain.com". Then you can host other web sites such as "www.myotherdomain.com" on the same Linode, which continues to use the fully-qualified hostname "machinename.mydomain.com".

Where are you reading or hearing that your server needs multiple FQDN's? I'd like to understand where that question is coming from.

Hi haus,

I didn't hear or read anything about having multiple FQDNs. I was just wondering if there are any cases required that, that's all.

I was just confused about what to set my FQDN to as I have more than site/domain and thought there might be some kind of criteria I should follow to set a FQDN for my server.

And no, I'm not confusing Fully Qualified Domain Name with Virtual Host in Apache.

So now after clearing things up, I came to this conclusion:
I can choose any domain of MY domains to be the FQDN of my server and I only need one FQDN. And my understanding is that FQDN is not used for connections/calls from outside the server, it's only used for inside connections only.

Am I right?

Correct.



Your FQDN can be used to access your Linode from outside, provided you assign it an A record in the DNS manager (or wherever you have your DNS), but it is not necessary to do so for any particular reason. You could always just use the IP address if you wanted (for example, for SSH), or any other domain name that points to your Linode.

I suppose there is one thing to mention. I'm not an expert on this but when my VPS sends mail (for example, from Perl or PHP scripts), the hostname shows up in the mail headers. So it is probably best to choose something non-offensive for your hostname.