Thoughts on how to generate these random strings are of course up
for
discussion. Given that initial machine creation may have limited available
I am fighting against human unreadable names in hostnames (specifically in datacenters)
and I created a little tool [1] that generates human readable and memorizable names made
out of frequently occurring given names and surnames from the 1990 US Census (public
domain data - confirmed with Fedora legal). This gives about 33 million unique total
names. Examples:
velma-pratico.my.lan
angie-warmbrod.my.lan
grant-goodgine.my.lan
alton-sieber.my.lan
velma-vanbeek.my.lan
don-otero.my.lan
sam-hulan.my.lan
We could consider similar approach for default hostnames. I can imagine the US names can
be confusing, we can swap these with colors or other words to make it little bit less
confusing (e.g. "blue-star"). This is definitely nicer than
"Fedora-c4feb4b3", I don't like sharing same prefixes, this makes tab
expansion unusable, it usually needs wider columns in lists etc. Distribution name is, I
think, not relevant when it comes to naming computers. It is just a name,
"yellow-dog" isn't that bad, is it?
Another thing that should be take into account is not doing this randomly, but seeding the
algorithm based on hardware specifics (MAC, serial number), so when system is
reprovisioned, it gets the very same hostname. This approach can be combined with the
above one if needed, giving:
- human readable names
- memorizable names
- consistent names after reinstallation
[1]
https://github.com/lzap/deacon
This is a rubygem, but this kind of thing is trivial (and fun) to write, I can give a hand
implementing this in Python in order to allow Anaconda to do this if folks like my idea.