Generating a random hostname

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 05:06:30PM -0500, Peter Steele wrote:
> Is there any facility in FreeBSD for generating a random hostname? We have a
> template with a fixed hostname that has to be changed after the template is
> closed. It would be useful to have a hostname generated randomly.

For random strings, I tend to use openssl (e.g. with base64 encoding);

    openssl rand -base64 18

You do run the risk here of getting non-alphabetic characters here, so you
might want to filter those:

    openssl rand -base64 18| sed 's|[^[:alpha:]]||g'

Or if you are fine with just hex numbers;

    openssl rand 18 | hexdump -e '8 "%X" "\n"'

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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