geekdecoder

The term hairpinning comes from the fact that the traffic comes from one source into a router or similar devices, makes a U-turn and goes back the same way it came.

Visualize this and you see something that looks like a hairpin.

Hairpin NAT is a useful technique for accessing an internal server using a public IP. Since you are using a public IP to attempt to access a server in your network, the traffic will attempt to go out to the internet. In order to reach the server, the traffic will need to be redirected to the correct location.
The issue with this article is that you need to load a website or use curl to access the website on an internal IP that is set up as NAT to a public IP.

Scenario:

Server1 – Web Server. Has a public IP 214.44.55.44 and is behind a firewall with the private IP 10.0.0.12.

When you try and load the site on this server, it does not load.
Fix: Set up hosts file to point to the private IP.

Use this information when changing the hostname in centos 7.

Ways to show the hostname

# hostname
# hostname -s
# hostname -f
# cat /etc/hostname
# hostnamectl

How to change the hostname.
In order to change or set a CentOS 7 machine hostname, use the hostnamectl command as shown in the below command excerpt.

# hostnamectl set-hostname your-new-hostname

In order to apply the new hostname, a system reboot is required, issue one of the below commands in order to reboot a CentOS 7 machine.

# init 6
# systemctl reboot
# shutdown -r now

A second method to setup a CentOS 7 machine hostname is to manually edit the /etc/hostname file

# nano /etc/hostname