Hostname

Hostnames—such as www.facebook.com, www.google.com, gaia.cs.umass.edu—are mnemonic and are therefore appreciated by humans.

However, hostnames provide no information about the location within the Internet of the host. This is why we identify hosts with IP Addresses. To do the conversion, we use the DNS.

Hostname in Ubuntu for SSH

When you are logged into a linux machine, you might see something like steven@ubuntu. In this case, it follows the format

<username>@<hostname>

2023-10-30: Ahhh, I finally understand the point of hostnames, they’re basically like aliases, so instead of having to add the ip manually, i.e. calling ssh user@11.481.32.169, you can have something much simpler like ssh user@robot.

Your network does have to know this, you need to use hostnamectl

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/networking_guide/sec_configuring_host_names_using_hostnamectl