I'm helping to administer a VM running Ubuntu with Media Temple.
The hostname was changed, and sendmail was removed and replaced with exim4.
To change the hostname 'sudo hostname newhostname' was issued, along with an edit of /etc/hostname.
Also the sendmail log rotate script had to be manually removed from /etc/cron.d/
However, periodically the hostname reverts, and the sendmail cron script re-appears out of thin air.
We have spoken to the hosting company and they insist that they have done nothing.
Is there anything in Ubuntu/Linux that could cause this behaviour?
Edit:
These are the running services:
[ ? ] modules_dep.sh
[ ? ] mysql
[ ? ] network-interface
[ ? ] network-interface-security
[ ? ] networking
[ ? ] ondemand
[ ? ] plymouth
[ ? ] plymouth-log
[ ? ] plymouth-splash
[ ? ] plymouth-stop
[ ? ] portmap
[ ? ] portmap-boot
[ ? ] portmap-wait
[ ? ] procps
[ + ] quota
[ - ] quotarpc
[ ? ] rc.local
[ - ] rsync
[ ? ] saslauthd
[ ? ] screen-cleanup
[ + ] sendmail
[ ? ] sendsigs
[ + ] ssh
[ ? ] stop-bootlogd
[ ? ] stop-bootlogd-single
[ + ] sysklogd
[ ? ] udev
[ ? ] udev-finish
[ ? ] udevmonitor
[ ? ] udevtrigger
[ ? ] umountfs
[ ? ] umountnfs.sh
[ ? ] umountroot
[ - ] urandom
[ ? ] vzquota
[ ? ] vzreboot
[ - ] wide-dhcpv6-client
There are no crontabs for the two users on the server - root and admin. And in ubuntu's cron.d cron.daily etc. directories, there's only one php5 log rotate cron. And the main /etc/crontab file does not have anything in it.
Do any of those services seem like they could be causing the reversion in hostname?
Perhaps this is an issue with something in start-up. Maybe a machine re-boot is causing this. I'll look around /etc/rc.local