What is it for

hostnamespoof is a simple program that aims to change the Linux hostname randomly (using a given hostname generator program), it can be ran as a commandline tool, or installed as a systemd service to run at each boot.

Why?

Hostnames are public information, they are sent part of DHCP messages for example, or NetBIOS responses, and can reveal the identity of a machine on local area networks.

In order to hide any information that could reveal the identity of users in a LAN, people use macchanger to spoof MAC addresses, I thought it could be useful for some people to also get random hostnames at each boot / when needed.

How to use

• Run install.sh as root, giving it the path to your program that generates hostnames (to use the existing docker_container_names.go, build it with: go build docker_container_names.go).

• The installation directory is /usr/share/hostnamespoof/, execute the spoof_hostname.sh script in that directory to get a random hostname

Current Hostname generators

• docker_container_names.go : The exact name generator Docker uses for container names

Isn't it cool to get new docker container names as hostnames at each boot?

Contributions are welcome

What are valid hostnames

From man 7 hostname:

       Hostnames are domains, where a domain is a hierarchical, dot-
       separated list of subdomains; for example, the machine "monet", in
       the "example" subdomain of the "com" domain would be represented as
       "monet.example.com".

       Each element of the hostname must be from 1 to 63 characters long and
       the entire hostname, including the dots, can be at most 253
       characters long.  Valid characters for hostnames are ASCII(7) letters
       from a to z, the digits from 0 to 9, and the hyphen (-).  A hostname
       may not start with a hyphen.