Host configuration -- use the hostname to configure the network

As I imagine many people to be, when bringing up hosts, I'm still stuck in the days of:

Step 1: (node) configure networking
Step 2: (node) configure the hostname
Step 3: (service1) configure DNS to match
Step 4: (service2) plug this into some form of configuration management
Step 5: profit

The problem is that you often have a complicated back and forth between configuration of the node and configuration of the node. If you decide to semi-automate this you might try and add dhcp into the mix:

Step 1: (service1) Allocate IP address for a node
Step 2: (node) Get MAC address from node
Step 3: (service2) Plug MAC+IP into DHCP configuration
Step 4: (service1+service2) Push out changes to dhcp/dns
Step 5: (node) initialize networking using DHCP
Step 6: profit

Adding in IPv6 and SLAAC, things get worse since you have to grab the SLAAC address after networking is brought up and that means two different changes to DNS. Pretty soon, you are spending several minutes just moving basic data between services on your network.

ENTER IPv6 and a slight amount of thought:

I recently had some other push factors (related to our private cloud) to try and minimize the effort spent here. I now use SLAAC and an IPv6 DNS address as a temporary configuration point. Then I query DNS for the information I need to configure the node. This basically just comes down to IPv4 and IPv6 address at the moment:

Step 1: (service1) Allocate IPv4 and IPv6 address
Step 2: (node) bring up node with temporary (SLAAC) config
Step 3: (node) query DNS for addresses and plug the values into a static configuration
Step 4: profit

Now all I need is a script on the new node to make this much faster and viola! My configuration is down to two steps:

Step 1: (service1) Allocate addresses
Step 2: (node) run: init_host new-hostname
Step 3: profit

Of course, init_host runs dig and plugs values into the key places. Finally, it runs some form of configuration management (puppet in our case) to get the rest of the host configured. Since many hosts are virtual instances under OpenStack, we can simply leave an init_host script in the base image for convenience. Time taken to bring up a new node has gone from minutes of error-prone copy/paste to seconds of error-prone typing. I'm much more likely to be careful over a period of seconds with a few steps than a period of minutes with many steps. Hopefully our infrastructure will benefit ... and hopefully yours will too!