[wpkg-users] Duplicate host names

[Rainer Meier]

Hi Antony,

On 09.08.2013 23:50, Antony Awaida wrote:
> We are looking to use WPKG in a higher ed environment where students
> may bring their own computers (the computers are not members of AD,
> Group etc...).

You might use extended host attributes to match profiles to dedicated hosts. But 
actually if you operate a kind of BYOD environment then users might change 
hostnames and even MAC adresses and also their entire physical machine any time 
they wish.

Such machines are hard to maintain by software deployment at first since users 
have full access on them. They might install/uninstall any software at any time. 
In order to deploy software reliably you would have to install some sort of WPKG 
client on them (which the users can also remove again immediately).

If you're willing to go down this lane and if your users deal well with it I 
would recommend to install the client in order to use the
/profile:<profileName>
command-line attribute. So actually you would assign a profile on the client 
regardless of its hostname, IP-address, MAC-address, OS version etc. WPKG would 
not even look up the hosts database and just go for the profile specified on the 
command line.

Since in such environments the clients are anyway very individually set up this 
way might be the most safe way to assign the desired profile to the client.


In fact you might even assign a custom profile to each of these-hosts by using 
meta-profiles like
/profile:user-usernameXY
Then define user-username-XY profile to include the profiles you would like to 
assign. This way each machine can have its own individual profile specified so 
you might assign custom software to each node. Or refer to some "standard set" 
by including other, generic profiles.


br,
Rainer