A current system, but this has been happening since I built this box last fall: the system gets its name via DHCP, not from a hostname file. On reboot, such as after a yum update, it *appears* as though rsyslogd is started before the network is up, and so it doesn't have its hostname yet... so /var/log/messages shows the hostname as localhost. If I restart rsyslogd, and everything's fine. Has anyone else seen this behaviour? mark