www and subdomains in /etc/hosts
hostname, hosts, subdomain, ubuntu
Solution
I think there may be some confusion between a machine hostname and hosting websites/domains on your machine.
To set the hostname you can use the `hostname` command. Something like the following should work on ubuntu. (You would also have to modify your DNS records so that `mycomputer.domain.com` resolved to your IP)
`sudo hostname mycomputer.domain.com`
See hostname man page for more information. You will also need to make these changes in the `/etc/hostname` file or else the hostname will change back when you next reboot.
To point a domain like `www.something.net` to a page on your machine you would need to edit the DNS records for something.net, these records could be maintained locally on the machine itself but you would have to setup a DNS server. It is quite likely that your DNS for `something.net` will be provided by the company you registered the domain with, in which case you would simply have to change which IP address `www.something.net` and `something.net` point to (via their website etc). Then setup a webserver to respond/serve pages for those sites.
You might find the ApacheMySQLPHP guide on the ubuntu wiki help for configuring a web server.
/etc/hosts would not really be involved unless you were making some kind of test setup/intranet system.
Hope this helps.
Problem
I'm setting up Ubuntu for the first time and I'd like to use this as a server to host websites: ``` www.something.net blah1.something.net blah2.something.net ``` what do i need to set up as the hostname? and how does this need to be set up in /etc/hosts file? thanks!