[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Setting Hostname on EC2 Instance Spinup

[Bryan McLellan < >]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Brian Akins 
<
 >
 wrote:
> Not to start a naming convention war, but we used to use a scheme like 
> that.  Many hours were wasted arguing.  Now*, we just name them simple 
> things (like, host1, host48, web1, db8).
> Since most of our configs are built using databags and searches and our 
> "doit" scripts use knife, having "meaningful" hostnames is not terribly 
> useful as noone every uses them directly much.
>
> *Note: "Now" meaning we do it some now and are moving towards it.

We use EC2 instance IDs, or something similar in other environments
calculated from GUIDs or other unique data for the node name and
primary dns name, but set the hostname to something based on the role
dynamically to stuff the shell prompt with useful information. Thus
the DNS hostname is something like "i-82bca6a8.example.org" but
/etc/hostname contains "server-environment-i-82bca6a8" It's helpful to
be able to sit back down at my desk and visually verify I'm not about
to do something nasty on a server in production.

I'd agree hostnames are meaningless these days are server resources
really are just reusable resources and 'knife ssh role:web screen' is
easier than remembering and learning a custom naming scheme or
managing one. Still, you can leverage naming in useful ways to get
information to convenient places, like shell prompts. It's easy to get
both with chef.

Bryan