UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

As the title suggests, I'm wondering if its possible to set a hostname to a name or word with Cyrillic letters (e.g. - Like the Russian alphabet). I tried installing the cyrillic-console package in Debian. I switched my desktop to Russian as well. However, when I try to set the hostname I get that this is invalid:

Code:

$ hostname Этропия
hostname: the specified hostname is invalid

I know Cyrillic domain names just started a few years ago. So it would not surprise me if this just isn't possible. Maybe I need some package to enable UTF-8. Either way I tried searching online and haven't came up with anything yet.

Any advice appreciated.

hostnames may be related to dns but aren't really dns. I wouldn't expect that limit to change.

Yeah, I know hostnames are different from DNS. I just thought I'd illustrate this might not work with hostnames yet. Its only been a few years this character set could work with domains.

The way they work with domains is to translate the text to "punycode". I just tried doing that with a converter online and found Этропия becomes xn--h1aldcj9dta in punycode. However, when I try to set that as a hostname it only comes back encoded:

Code:

$ hostname xn--h1aldcj9dta
$ hostname
xn--h1aldcj9dta