I think we're all in agreement that removing dependencies on /etc/hosts is an improvement. I'm working on this and should have the changes committed this week.
To summarize the situation and changes, the backend code currently reads /etc/hosts in order to determine the private IP address of a node. It does not rely on the computer.privateIPaddress field in the database. Several node configuration tasks depend on knowing the correct private IP address. The backend code also currently uses the computer.hostname value to SSH into nodes. As a result, it depends on hostname-private IP address resolution working correctly -- which is usually accomplished via /etc/hosts. I will change the code to: (1) Not read or reference /etc/hosts at all (2) Use the computer.privateIPaddress field as the authoritative value (3) Use the private IP address instead of the hostname for all SSH and other connections (4) Add utils.pm::update_private_ip_address This will allow any provisioning module to have control over how private IP addresses are allocated. If they are dynamically allocated when a node is loaded or instantiated, the provisioning module can retrieve the dynamic private IP address from Openstack or some other provisioning API, and call update_private_ip_address to set the correct value in the database. The provisioning module should also call $self->data->set_private_ip_address. When control is passed from the provisioning to the OS module, everything should be set up correctly. -Andy
