Forum Discussion
Samurai
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusPool members hostname
Hi,
Does anyone know how to get the hostnames of the members in a pool instead of IP addresses?
I run this command to get the members list
b pool show | grep +- | awk {'print $3 " " $4'}
As far as I know " b node show" does show the member with IP which means hostname is getting resolved to IP address.
The F5 is 8900 with BigIP 10.2.0
Thanks in advance
hooleylistCirrostratus
Are the IP's resolvable to host names via the hosts file or DNS? If so, you could set a DB key to have LTM resolve them:
db bigpipe.displayhostnames true
However, this can add significant latency to the GUI as LTM will be doing lookups to display the host names.
Do you want to do this regularly or just once? If the latter, you might try doing it off of LTM.
Aaron- Chris_Miller
Altostratus
Posted By hoolio on 10/14/2010 10:20 AM
Are the IP's resolvable to host names via the hosts file or DNS? If so, you could set a DB key to have LTM resolve them:
db bigpipe.displayhostnames true
However, this can add significant latency to the GUI as LTM will be doing lookups to display the host names.
Do you want to do this regularly or just once? If the latter, you might try doing it off of LTM.
Aaron
If they're resolved, or manually named, the names show up through the config uitlity > pool members. I couldn't find a way to have it display names via the "bigpipe pool" commands though. 
SamuraiThanks Aaron for your reply.
I found this F5 Solution doc http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/8000/700/sol8719.html
As mentioned therein, "bigpipe cli hostname lookup enable" command would help besides setting system preference using GUI. I see the lookup is disabled on my F5. The consequences of enabling this lookup is given in the doc. However for day today management, I think this lookup is helpful. Otherwise one needs to resolve it externally.- SamuraiAn alternate option I learned is to use screen names for the nodes in the conf file. With this I can use the hostname instead of IP address with the commands.
Using a little script, I could use the screen name facility to reference the IP address to hostname wherever command output shows only IP addresses.
Since I manage the LB mostly using CLI, this is useful. I like the output of the virtual show command as it gives the logical hierarchy of VIP -> VS - > Pool -> Members.
With the script, I can get the status of all of the above in one shot. - hooleylistI didn't know about the cli hostname lookup option. Thanks for pointing that out.
Aaron
