I'm not sure what the heartache is over long names.  NetView is sensible
enough to put short names in labels on the topology GUI (even though it
discovers FQDN and uses these for the Selection Name field).  My personal
rule is to ensure DNS is up, working and comprehensive before going anywhere
NetView.  The administrative overhead of getting /etc/hosts in synch is just
not worth the effort - and what do you do re multi-homed hosts?  /etc/hosts
cannot resolve multiple addresses to a single name.

The other question is what do you do when you have a machine name clash
(company mergers, departments going UDI,...)??  DNS is designed to give
global resolution and definitely scales to meet that challenge.

If you are looking to produce reports from your event log / trapd.log that
you explicitly want to have short names, I'd be more tempted to look at
post-processing in my report generation, to strip off the domain name.

Cheers,
Jane

"Todd H." wrote:

> This issue of "Any way to shorten the FQDN when netview reports
> alerts, or are ya stuck with what your resolver gives ya?" came up in
> our recent NetView class that Scott and I attended.
>
> As leslie mentioned, having a "hosts then DNS" policy along with
> listing only shortnames in /etc/hosts does work around it, but creates
> added administrative overhead of synchronizing DNS and /etc/hosts.
>
> I think we concluded in the class that you can run a script to export
> the object database (/usr/OV/bin/nvdbformat), chop down the selection
> name to the hostname, and then update the object database accordingly
> (with /usr/OV/bin/nvdbimport)--without having to do DNS tricks.  There
> are man pages for each of these.
>
> For autodiscovery folks, then the question is maintenance.  I think
> Scott was whipping up a script to be launched when the internal
> NetView "node added" internal trap was seen--the script would fixup
> the selection name to be the hostname alone on the fly.
>
> Can anyone think of any downsides to this other than the possibility
> of a name collision?
>
> --
> Todd H.
> http://www.toddh.net/
> _________________________________________________________________________
> NV-L List information and Archives: http://www.tkg.com/nv-l

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