Here's the story. We are in the process of migrating from a Sequent unix machine running Dynix/ptx 4.4.8 to an IBM P660 machine running AIX 5.1.

An issue came up pertaining to different applications that have been hard-coded to resolve to the Sequent machine (seq2). When the cutover occurs, the applications will need to be pointed at the IBM machine (palprod).

Will adding the old hostname to the host files (entry for new machine would also contain old machine name) that reside on the application's machine do the trick as long as we shut down the old machine at the cutover time? Are there any gotchas out there that pertain to this type of solution?

The apps are written in Cobol, Progress, C, and VB.

Assuming you have an internal DNS, you could
add a "CNAME" type entry into your zone files
so that "seq2" will map to "palprod". This
would at least be realtively clean and localized.

Something like...

palprod IN A 192.168.254.200.
seq2 IN CNAME palprod.myco.com.