[rhinstaller/anaconda/pulls/164 master] Generate random hostnames

sgallagher installerbot-noreply at redhat.com
Wed Jul 1 14:49:10 UTC 2015


So, just to summarize here what I've heard on IRC:
The main concern is that there are places in the presentation layer where a user would be presented with a link that includes the hostname. For example, at the console, they would see a command telling them how to reach the server with VNC in order to perform a graphical install of a headless system. If this is randomly-generated, then that link will almost certainly not work because it will not be available in DNS.

Proposed approach: if the final portion of the domain component is .lan (which all randomly-generated hosts are), then when presenting this to the user we will provide the IP address instead of the hostname. Would that be acceptable.

As for why we are doing this at all: this is to simplify the domain-joining process. When joining FreeIPA and AD domains, the machine's full hostname is used as its identity and added to DNS. Using localhost.localdomain for this causes significant problems. Users have to take an additional manual step of changing their hostnames before they can join the domain.

I have other patches in the works for changing the domain part of the hostname on domain-join, so it's primarily the host part of the hostname that is important here. However, for users attempting to deploy a FreeIPA domain controller (possibly for evaluation), having a random domain pre-selected for them is also simpler.
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To view this pull request on github, visit https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda/pull/164


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