Frustrations in Ubuntu 18.04

My first frustration with Ubuntu 18.04 came yesterday. I created a template VM with my basic toolkit that any machine in my network should have. I then deployed the VM and asked vSphere to set the hostname to the value of the VM name. Strangely, this didn’t happen: The new machine booted up alright, but its name remained that of the template.

Remember the old way to manually change the name of a machine in Linux? It went something like this:

Add the new hostname to your /etc/hosts so sudo doesn’t get confused.
Replace the old hostname in /etc/hostname with the new one.
Reboot the computer or restart all affected services.

The new way goes like this:

Add the new hostname to your /etc/hosts so sudo doesn’t get confused.
Replace the old hostname in /etc/hostname with the new one.
Reboot the computer.
Notice that the hostname is the same as it was before you attempted to change it.
Web search “change hostname ubuntu 18.04”.
Discover that there’s a new utility, hostnamectl, which has a command, change-hostname, that takes the new hostname as an argument.
Run hostnamectl change-hostname [newname]
Run hostnamectl without any arguments to confirm that “Static hostname” has the correct value.
Log off and back on again and be happy that everything seems to be working.
Reboot the computer after doing some changes.
Notice that the hostname is back to what it was.
Run hostnamectl change-hostname [newname] again, and check in /etc/hostname just to see that it actually did change the file to contain the new hostname.
Check in /etc/hosts and see that the new name appears there too.
Scour the web some more for additional information.
Find some mention of cloud-init.
Read up on it and see the point of it – but also that it doesn’t apply to my current environment.
Run sudo apt remove cloud-init
Reboot the server and see that it works as expected again.
(In the future: Learn more about cloud-init and re-evaluate whether it should be implemented in my environment as a complement to Ansible).