short vs. canonical name

[Christian, Ron]

We're bringing up 4.1.2 on a QA machine, and have noticed an anomaly.

 

Our environment is mostly Solaris 9 with a few machines running Red Hat
Enterprise AS.   We have Hobbit 4.0.4 running on our production
administrative server and Hobbit 4.1.2 server running on our QA box.
The intention was to qualify 4.1.2 and push it into the production
environment if it seemed reasonable to do so.

 

I've run into a problem with the QA instance on Red Hat machines.  I can
see a couple ways to fix it but want to find out what is considered
"best practices"

 

The Solaris node names are the short (non-canonical) form, but the node
names of RHEE tend to be fully qualified.  It looks like we will have
more Red Hat and fewer Solaris machines in the near future, so this
issue will become significant.

 

It looks like different parts of 4.1.2 arrive at the machine name in
different ways.  The name of the server is set explicitly as
BBSERVERHOSTNAME in hobbitserver.cfg.  It appears that this is used both
for the built-in tests and server extensions.

 

The client, on the other hand, appears to get it's hostname in a
different fashion depending on whether it's a built-in test or an
extension.  With the client short name in bbhosts, but the client uname
defaulting to the fully qualified name, the built-in tests work but
extensions do not.  It appears that the built-in tests somehow figure
out the client's short name, and the server recognizes it and displays
the data.  However, when extensions are invoked, the client name is set
to the fully qualified name, the name is munged to hostname,my,domain
(note commas) and the server doesn't recognize the client.

 

I see a few ways around this.  We could set the uname on all the Linux
boxes to the short name, and remember that we have to do this for any
new installs.  (I'm not sure if this will break anything else.)  Or, we
could set up a hobbit alias for each Linux machine (ick...).  Or, we
could change runclient.sh to use "hostname -s" instead of "uname -n"
(But only on Linux boxes.) or change the "MACHINE="`echo $MACHINEDOTS |
sed [...]`" expression to dump the domain name instead of changing the
dots to commas.

 

Have others run into this, and is there an accepted solution?

 

 

            Ron

 

-

Silence is golden.  Duct tape is silver.

 

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