Controlling Host Names...

[SlightlyLoony]

Discovery automatically names your CIs by using the host name. Ordinarily, Discovery finds the host name by a reverse lookup of a CI's IP address in DNS. However, if a CI has no DNS name and it happens to be a Windows device, then Discovery will look up its name in WINS. In either case, the name you get might not be exactly what you want. Perhaps you'd rather use manually assigned (or imported) names for your CIs, or perhaps you'd rather they were all in lower case letters. How can you wrestle these names into shape? You don't have to hire an enforcer like the bad boy at right — Discovery has the means built right in, just a few clicks away. Read on for the details…

Discovery includes three properties that directly affect how host names are handled. To see them, navigate to Discovery Definition → Properties (their default settings are shown in the screen scrape at right). Here's what they do:

• Always Update Hostname: If checked, the CI's name will be updated on every discovery, whether it already had a name or not. If not checked, the CI's name will be updated only if was empty before the discovery. The only real reasons to uncheck this setting are if you have manual or imported CI names, or if your DNS is not a reliable source of names.
• Include Domain Name in Hostname: When checked, this setting will cause the domain name to be included in the CI's name. Instead of a name like "hamburglar", you'd see "hamburlar.mickey-d.com". This setting is most useful if your organization uses several domains, and there's the possibility that host names are duplicated amongst them. One thing to be aware of: if Discovery finds the host name through WINS, it doesn't know what the domain name is and therefore can't include it.
• Hostname in Lower Case: This one is really purely aesthetic, as both DNS and WINS names are case-insensitive. Most people prefer this to be checked, as then DNS names (which are conventionally in lower case) and WINS names (which are conventionally in upper case) all have the same case.