[Xymon] Xymon Client Short Hostname

[John Thurston]

On 5/31/2016 11:11 PM, Stef Coene wrote:
> On 05/31/2016 11:27 PM, Ryan Novosielski wrote:
>> You are most welcome.
>>
>> So here’s some followup: many of us have had this problem before, and
>> it seems OS-specific. Is there any way to get this more right by
>> default? I see that many/most of my entries in hosts.cfg have
>> CLIENT:<hostname> specified. My server is Solaris 10, my clients are a
>> mixture of things.

> In theory, a hostname contains no domain suffix.
> So you should never have a FQDN in your hosts.cfg

{bangs head on desk} This approach is so 1998 . . .

Moving from Big Brother to Xymon was so liberating because we finally 
got consistent "fully qualified domainn name" (FQDN) support. There is 
no reason not to use FQDN in your hosts.cfg. Use them. It is silly not to.

All of the hosts in my Xymon are defined with FQDN. But there are 
several which also have "CLIENT:" tags defined with their "short" name. 
These are generally:
  + Hosts running scripts from our BB days before we had FQDN support
  + Windows hosts whose admins don't know how to configure the client
  + Editors who blindly copy some other line from hosts.cfg and assume
    they must have a CLIENT: tag

IMHO, anyone using truncated host names in their hosts.cfg should have 
to justify each of those entries in writing. FQDNs work. Make the world 
a better place; use them.


-- 
    Do things because you should, not just because you can.

John Thurston    907-465-8591
John.Thurston at alaska.gov
Enterprise Technology Services
Department of Administration
State of Alaska