Hi, Currently, XO hostnames are set on first boot in the following format: xo-A-B-C Where A, B and C are the last 3 bytes of the MAC address expressed in hex.
In Nicaragua we are seeing cases where XOs have no hostname set, both on XO-1 and XO-1.5. On XO-1 this is presumably because libertas usb8388 init was never 100% reliable, and on XO-1.5 its presumably because the wireless card was DOA but was replaced after first boot. When no hostname is set in this way, networking doesn't work properly, since we don't create a network config (oops). Also, the hostname must be unique within a group of peers for avahi-based collaboration to work (as we've learnt from painful experience). We could harden up our initialisation to work better in the face of no MAC address being available on first boot, but actually that is becoming more complicated (due to increased parallelisation, the network adapter will now come up late in boot). Moving to a simpler scheme would solve the issues seen in the field and avoid the challenges around network device initialisation. I propose we move to generating hostnames in the same format as before (xo-A-B-C), but with A, B and C assigned as random hex digits on first boot. (If people are worried about collisions, maybe we add a D digit.) As far as I can see, the hostname is not really of relevance to anything except avahi. It is not broadcast to the DHCP server when connecting to a network, for example. Any thoughts/objections? Thanks, Daniel _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel