Host ID.

[Ceri Davies]

On Sun, Apr 08, 2007 at 10:54:34AM +0100, Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 8 Apr 2007, Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav wrote:
> 
> >Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> >>If we move disks with root file system, it's this more or less the same 
> >>host, isn't it?
> >
> >No.  I recently installed three servers by replicating the disk from a 
> >fourth and changing the host name and IP address in rc.conf.
> 
> Yes, one of the nice properties of FreeBSD -- as opposed to, say, Windows, 
> is that it's trivial to install a hundred boxes by dropping the same image 
> onto all of them and configuring host-specific parameters using DHCP.  But 
> there is a tricky tension here: the notion of a persisting host ID is very 
> useful, in the a similar way to the way in which a persisting SSH host key 
> is useful. If we're going to adopt a host ID model, we may want to make 
> generation and configuration of the host ID conditional on an explicit 
> variable in rc.conf (i.e., hostid_enable="YES" which causes it to be 
> generated the first time and loaded future times, similar to SSH keys), and 
> make it very easy to force a regen.  That way, you can image the boxes with 
> the rc.conf setting set, but they don't generate host IDs until they boot 
> the first time.

Or perhaps we need an equivalent to sys-unconfig[1] ?

[1] http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-5166/6mbb1kqj3?q=sysconfig&a=view

Ceri
-- 
That must be wonderful!  I don't understand it at all.
                                                  -- Moliere
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