Ask HN: Is there a hostname manager utility?
2 comments
Are you looking for something beyond what a host alias in your `./ssh/config` file can provide?
$ cat ~/.ssh/config
Host myserver
HostName 10.10.10.10
User ken
$ ssh myserverCorrect, I'm looking for a tool that manages a large list of individual hostnames, I do already extensively use my ssh config to automatically apply the right credentials etc. to the hosts once I have the hostname I want.
a .yaml file in your favorite editor?
For metadata search, use regular text search in editor.. A prefix to avoid false positives comes handy, for example "s:aws" instead of "aws". You can also have nested structs to group your hosts widely.
For querying, tiny scripts in your favorite language.. the idea is to have many one-off scripts which do exactly what you need, instead of having one super-script that does it all. Here is an example of one of my scripts, which looks up IP based on human-readable name. (I could probably do it in one line of "yq" as well)
The tricky part is sometimes you need a printable report -- for this I export to csv and then open in editor. Not perfect, but works.
For metadata search, use regular text search in editor.. A prefix to avoid false positives comes handy, for example "s:aws" instead of "aws". You can also have nested structs to group your hosts widely.
For querying, tiny scripts in your favorite language.. the idea is to have many one-off scripts which do exactly what you need, instead of having one super-script that does it all. Here is an example of one of my scripts, which looks up IP based on human-readable name. (I could probably do it in one line of "yq" as well)
#!/usr/bin/python3 -B
# given a "name" in arguments, return corresponding IP
import yaml, os, sys
s = yaml.safe_load(open(os.path.expanduser("~/data/hostnames.yaml")))
match = [info["ip"] for group in s.values() for name, info in group.items() if name in sys.argv[1:]]
if len(match) != 1: sys.exit("name not found")
print(match[0])
The tricky part is sometimes you need a printable report -- for this I export to csv and then open in editor. Not perfect, but works.
Are there any tools out there that are similar to what I'm describing?