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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 Sm=F8rgrav wrote:

> Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@FreeBSD.org> writes:
>> If we move disks with root file system, it's this more or less the same=
=20
>> host, isn't it?
>
> No.  I recently installed three servers by replicating the disk from a=20
> 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=20
that it's trivial to install a hundred boxes by dropping the same image ont=
o=20
all of them and configuring host-specific parameters using DHCP.  But there=
 is=20
a tricky tension here: the notion of a persisting host ID is very useful, i=
n=20
the a similar way to the way in which a persisting SSH host key is useful.=
=20
If we're going to adopt a host ID model, we may want to make generation and=
=20
configuration of the host ID conditional on an explicit variable in rc.conf=
=20
(i.e., hostid_enable=3D"YES" which causes it to be generated the first time=
 and=20
loaded future times, similar to SSH keys), and make it very easy to force a=
=20
regen.  That way, you can image the boxes with the rc.conf setting set, but=
=20
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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