> Right, that works great. At least as soon as you make use of the > -u|--hostname <HOSTNAME> option. ;-) > > $ man fai > > "This is useful in conjunction with the dirinstall action, where you > want to manually define a hostname that should be used for defining > classes and for the network setup and other stuff."
Poettering (and others) promote /etc/machine-id to be used as a machine specific identifier. (A more generic version of the D-Bus specific /var/lib/dbus/machine-id). This may or may not be useful for your scenario. The ID could be created during machine deployment (dirinstall) and stay the same for the whole lifetime of the system. (Including possible hostname changes...) Personally I don't like using the hostname as a machine identifier. It's possible that two hosts want to use the same hostname. Uniqueness can be forced by requiring unique hostnames throughout the whole company/domain/whatever or by relying on the fqdn. But that would introduce a dependency on the current network configuration. What happens if the machine is relocated to a different domain? How to identify if it is still the same machine or a totally different one? How to tell which domain is used to identify a multi-homed machine?
