Host/Domain name in LMS 3.0

[ktokashhh]

Hey *, quick question. I'm trying to get a load of devices into LMS, and their hostnames follow the convention

[row+rack+instance].[datacenter].[domainname]

It looks quirky but it is what it is, and actually works pretty well. The problem is that I can't figure out how to get the [datacenter] portion of the name to be reflected in the hostname rather than the domain name.

For example:

0101rs1.chi1.domain.com

ends up in LMS as:

0101rs1

This is going to be a problem moving forward because we have multiple 0101rs1 switches, each in different locations. I can remake the hierarchical naming convention by hand, but there are an awful lot of them, and I can't even "select all" within RME or CS Device Management.

Is there a way around this?

[Joe Clarke]

According to RFC 1035, the hostname cannot contain a inner '.' so CiscoWorks is correct in its handling. Everything after the first dot is considered the domain name by CiscoWorks.

That said, even though the rest of your hostname is being placed into the domain name field, this should not be a problem for CiscoWorks. applications should combine the hostname plus the domain name when trying to communicate with devices. As for being able to distinguish devices, the display name can contain the entire hostname plus domain name. That is, a display name can legally be:

0101rs1.chi1.domain.com

Or just:

0101rs1.chi1

It's up to you.

What might be easier if you're just getting started, is to dump DCR to a CSV file, modify the file, then reimport it once you've made your changes.

[ktokashhh]

Thanks for the info. Any chance you can give me something to search for in that RFC? I actually read through it, but couldn't find the inner dot mentioned. Section 2.3.1., "Preferred name syntax", had some syntax obviously, but it was all revolving around colons (heh). I skimmed RFC 822 also, but that's going so far back as to be of historical interest for my inner geek (1982, talks about ARPANET text messaging).

I'm trying to drum up support for changing the hostnames and DNS entries for about 600 switches so we can better utilize LMS because I foresee it as our primary method of administration (reports, config baselines and backups, etc.). It'd be nice if I could point to the exact line where we violated an RFC and hence Cisco rules and we suck.

[Joe Clarke]

The section is 2.3.1:

The following syntax will result in fewer problems with many

applications that use domain names (e.g., mail, TELNET).

::= | " "

::= | "."

::= [ [ ] ]

::= |

::= | "-"

::= |

::= any one of the 52 alphabetic characters A through Z in

upper case and a through z in lower case

::= any one of the ten digits 0 through 9

Note that while upper and lower case letters are allowed in domain

names, no significance is attached to the case. That is, two names with

the same spelling but different case are to be treated as if identical.

The labels must follow the rules for ARPANET host names. They must

start with a letter, end with a letter or digit, and have as interior

characters only letters, digits, and hyphen. There are also some

restrictions on the length. Labels must be 63 characters or less.

Note this last paragraph as well as the syntax guideline above. The only valid interior characters are letters, digits, and a hyphen. Even the underscore (which many Windows users like to use) is invalid and may cause problems.