-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: RIPEMD160 Lionel B. Dyck wrote: | Given the number of servers (real and virtual) that can exist how do you | assign host names while avoiding dupliates? | | We have come up with an 8 character host name standard that will also be | the z/vm guest name. The first 5 positions vary depending upon the | location, the os and the function with the last 3 positions being 001 to | 999 to ensure a unique name. Right now an excel worksheet is used. This is | not something that is new so my thinking was that there had to be an | application for assigning host names and tracking information about them. | | Does anyone know of one? |
I find it interesting that nobody so far mentioned RFC1178 (Choosing a name for your computer): ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1178.txt. There are several excellent ideas in that document. I do agree that there need not be a direct correlation between z/VM userids and hostnames, because they can be matched using other means direct (MAC address in the directory) or indirect (IP address, spreadsheet, inventory, etc.). Following the above guidelines pretty much rules out collisions in the first 8 characters of the hostname though (using a theme name, for example), so one may just as well trim the hostname to 8 characters and simply use it in the directory. I'd suggest using GPOS or TXT for geographic data and subdomains for organizational/divisional delegation; DNS is feature-rich enough to be able to facilitate that, and you also avoid namespace collisions by using subdomains: brixton.rd.foo.net won't collide with brixton.sales.foo.net, where rd and sales are obviously subdomains delegated to R&D and sales departments, respectively. WKAs (well-known aliases, such as www.foo.net) can and should always (except in the case of a NS and MX) be registered as CNAMEs which allows for easy book-keeping and maintenance windows as well. As far as automated assigning and tracking goes, I'll keep out of it: there were a number of good ideas presented so far, and none of them is fundamentally incompatible with the above. Using a name repository in the form of a database table should make it fairly easy for a script to fetch a next-available-name, claim it and register it in both DNS and DHCP databases. Kind regards, - -- ~ Grega Bremec ~ gregab at p0f dot net -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFGNv6+fu4IwuB3+XoRAwUiAJ931gVHkB5jyql/8kC39BD95ShRugCfftHW +ZSifXcxoJZ4Ho5Y1aPaHMA= =opTy -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
