[chef] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Bring up the discussion for knife-ec2 --node-name-prefix option

[James Light < >]

Okay. I may misunderstand the topic here. It sounds like you're saying
that the i-xXxXxxwhatever-whatever-whocan-remember-any-of-this AWS EC2
instance ID string should be good enough for everyone to use as a node
name? Either that or they should settle for naming their nodes
explicitly at creation time.

And I thought what the pull request in the link was asking for was a
way to have a prefix set so that one could launch a whole formation of
nodes and have the node names all be able to be easily matched later
by a trivial regular expression.

If your point is that this functionality is not needed specifically in
the EC2 plugin, I think you have a strong stance and can be shown to
be correct.

If your point is that this functionality isn't needed for any reason
at all anywhere, I think you are being inflexible and at least
bordering on what seems myopic.

You don't really need this in the ec2 plugin per-se as I don't see
this functionality being EC2-specific. Where I'm at, we already have a
script that we call that just interactively asks for the knife options
while suggesting the ones that we generally use to launch a base linux
instance with no frills (which is the usual case if we're launching
from knife), so it would be easy to add a 'Node Name Prefix' option
and then use that for repeated knife calls. No EC2 plugin patching
needed.

While I don't understand the orignal idea of why this needs to be an
EC2 plugin, but I also don't understand what I interpret as implying
that some md5-lookin hash thingmabobbyboo is a memorable name. Unique
and useful as a unique ID in the context of dynamic generation, YES,
but I'm a human being and sometime I'd also like to remember what the
heck I just called one of my programmable resources so I can easily
refer to it later.

What am I missing on both sides of this please?

*) how is this ec2 specific?
*) are there any situations where it is useful to have memorable and
even groupable node namings or can we do all of that through other
attributes and environments and roles?
*) any other details that I don't even know that I don't know yet?

Thanks!


On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 1:49 PM, AJ Christensen 
<
 >
 wrote:
> The machines already come with extremely useful names (ec2). Node name
> currently can be explicitly set or reflects the machine host name, instance
> ID. No?
>
> I believe the instance ID system currently in use may have been developed by
> some sort of computer scientist. Hard to say though.
>
> The negativity, and I'll thank you for asking, stems from the repeated
> requests over time for pretty snowflake node names of varying forms. The
> answer remains the same, so obviously one might become a little jaded.
>
> This doesn't need to be functionality baked into 'knife-ec2'. Not only that,
> but naming / host name management, machine DNS (etc) are solved problems
> during convergence time.
>
> I hope this clarifies my original statement and I'd like to apologize for
> the negativity, it doesn't really help.
>
> I got 99 problems bit naming isn't one.
>
> Cheers,
>
> AJ
>
> On Oct 21, 2012 10:28 AM, "James Light" 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
>>
>> Labels are for people who like naming things... like the whole field
>> of computer scientists. All we do when it comes down to it is name
>> things and refer to them by names that make sense to us to do things
>> that are usually useful for some reason or another.
>>
>> Why the negativity towards someone else's perception of how to name
>> things usefully?
>>
>> On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 12:53 PM, John Dewey 
>> <
 >
>>  wrote:
>> > +1
>> >
>> > On Sunday, October 21, 2012 at 9:51 AM, AJ Christensen wrote:
>> >
>> > Labels are for jam jars, not machinery
>> >
>> > --AJ
>> >
>> > On Oct 21, 2012 11:21 PM, "Sachin Sagar Rai" 
>> > <
 >
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > Ohai Chefs!
>> >
>> > Last week, there was a good discussion on whether to bring the
>> > --elastic-ip
>> > attachment into the knife-ec2 and I hope that it will settle down and
>> > get
>> > release on the upcoming version.
>> >
>> > But at this very same time, I'ld like to know and bring up the
>> > discussion on
>> > this pull req as well: https://github.com/opscode/knife-ec2/pull/61
>> >
>> > I'm really positive about this option as well.
>> >
>> > Want to hear about the community on this!
>> >
>> > -------------------------------------------
>> > @millisami
>> > ~ Sachin Sagar Rai
>> > Ruby on Rails Developer
>> > http://tfm.com.np
>> > http://nepalonrails.tumblr.com
>> > Sent with Sparrow
>> >
>> >