Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2007 10:54:34 +0100 (BST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no> Cc: Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer@FreeBSD.org>, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Host ID. Message-ID: <20070408105140.L77212@fledge.watson.org> In-Reply-To: <86d52fut50.fsf@dwp.des.no> References: <20070407120656.GD63916@garage.freebsd.pl> <cb5206420704070607j7afe5349r180151dac1ec3e92@mail.gmail.com> <20070407145154.GG63916@garage.freebsd.pl> <86d52fut50.fsf@dwp.des.no>
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On Sun, 8 Apr 2007, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote: > Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@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. Robert N M Watson Computer Laboratory University of Cambridge
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