The current rc.conf system doesn't seem to allow for separating out host identity from host configuration. As a result I'm not able to create a site-wide rc.conf file and rdist it to multiple machines, configured identically except for having distinct own host names. I think some very basic information identifying a host should be kept in its own place:
host name and ip address for each network interface And I like the way SunOS does it: The file hostname.<if> contains the machine's host name, where <if> is the name of the network interface. E.g., if the only network interface is le0, the file hostname.le0 contains the host name. With multiple network interfaces you would have a distinct hostname.<if> file for each one. Now you can rdist /etc/hosts containing all host names and IP addresses. At boot time we get the host name from hostname.<if>, look up the host name in /etc/hosts, and get our IP address. And non-default netmasks are listed in /etc/netmasks, which can also be propagated via rdist. To reassign IP addresses, simply rdist a new copy of /etc/hosts and reboot all machines. Rahul To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
