Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 17:34:29 -0500 From: "Ben Kaduk" <minimarmot@gmail.com> To: "Robert Watson" <rwatson@freebsd.org> Cc: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dag-Erling_Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@freebsd.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Host ID. Message-ID: <47d0403c0704081534k2aece4cx7516d073bdb7f3ea@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20070408105140.L77212@fledge.watson.org> References: <20070407120656.GD63916@garage.freebsd.pl> <cb5206420704070607j7afe5349r180151dac1ec3e92@mail.gmail.com> <20070407145154.GG63916@garage.freebsd.pl> <86d52fut50.fsf@dwp.des.no> <20070408105140.L77212@fledge.watson.org>
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On 4/8/07, Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org> wrote: > [snip] > > 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. > > Robert N M Watson > Computer Laboratory > University of Cambridge I like this proposal a lot -- FreeBSD is very flexible, and people can and will use any mechanism available to make their lives simpler; this can call for some very creative installation mechanisms. Robert's proposal is the most general one I've seen (well, it's orthogonal to a lot of this thread). Also, it allows for the paranoid or highly-secure types to change their hostid (or prevent it from being generated in the first place) -- I have not yet decided if I would maintain a local diff to block a unique ID from my systems. -Ben Kaduk
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