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

[Rob Guttman < >]

Dan, good point and good advice.  I went with the primary role and instance_id for the 'alias' attribute.  Although I got the incremental numbering scheme to work fairly well (including filling in gaps from terminations), I can't guaarntee unqiueness easily with that approach which is necessary since I now use the alias as the nagios host_name.  This alias is now also used in each instance's command prompt.

Nagios is already so much better with the alias attribute as host_name.

Thanks, all.
- Rob

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Daniel DeLeo < "> > wrote:

On Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Rob Guttman wrote:

+1.  Sean's reasons are our reasons.  We don't actually care about the hostnames, per se.  Any descriptive 'alias' attribute (which is what I'm implementing now instead of hostnames) can save a lookup for monitoring and comparable.

- Rob

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Sean OMeara < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

2 cents:

The reason I favor descriptive host naming conventions are because
they show up all over in logs, metrics consoles, alerts, etc.

I'd much rather click on something semantically useful when checking
to see if my database is indeed swapping, and getting an alert saying
"host i-ec45e683 is down" while I'm out to dinner doesn't tell me if I
need to go running for a laptop or not.

-s

Yeah, the thing to keep in mind is that meaningful hostnames and meaningful hostnames with autoincrementing integer suffixes aren't the same thing. You can keep the meaningful part and append a randomish suffix (EC2 instance ID, whatever). It'll look nice in your logs and pages, but you won't need to run an autoincrementing integer service to keep your hostnames in order.

-- 
Dan DeLeo