hostname_generator

A deterministic generator of random hostnames.

A trivial rule and a seeded random number generator allow a human-readable hostname to be associated with a given physical machine, or a given (re)deployment of VMs

The Birthday Problem is unkind to very large deployments, pull requests welcome to expand the lists or expand the name space.

The python script reports probability of hostname collision with a given deployment size, then prints some examples.

The shell scripts will generate a host from a given seed (like a mac address).
The script will hash the seed (md5), which allows any unique data source to be used and still effectively span a huge namespace.

Installation

This is intended for single board computers that get imaged and dropped into new machines.

Clone this repo into /usr/local/sbin/
Copy hostname_generator.service into /etc/systemd/system
Call systemctl enable hostname_generator.service

Without installation

To just name your system once off, run change_hostname.sh $(./name_gen.sh $(cat /sys/class/net/eth0/address))