Setting node name in chef to hostname

This bug was originally filed in Launchpad as [LP: #1912437](https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1912437)

Launchpad details

affected_projects = []

assignee = None

assignee_name = None

date_closed = None

date_created = 2021-01-20T05:01:19.729344+00:00

date_fix_committed = None

date_fix_released = None

id = 1912437

importance = wishlist

is_complete = False

lp_url = https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1912437

milestone = None

owner = scahartner

owner_name = Alex

private = False

status = triaged

submitter = scahartner

submitter_name = Alex

tags = ['chef']

duplicates = []

_Launchpad user **Alex(scahartner)** wrote on 2021-01-20T05:01:19.729344+00:00_

We are using auto-install to PXE boot a number of ubuntu 20.04 hosts. These hosts are physical servers. The hostname is set via DHCP, however in the auto-install configuration file we set the identity to "localhost".

We are also trying to boot strap these servers with chef. For this we are using the user-data section in auto-install to invoke the chef module of cloud-init on first boot. This kinda works, but all the hosts which register with our chef server in this way report with a name of : iid-datasource-none

The only way we have found so far around this problem was to not accept the license in the chef module and to invoke a chef-client run via the run-cmd module as follows.

runcmd:
- knife ssl fetch -c /etc/chef/client.rb
- knife ssl check -c /etc/chef/client.rb
- chef-client -N `hostname -f` --chef-license accept
- rm /etc/chef/validation.pem

This is not a very nice approach and it would be much better to have this option supported in the node_name attribute from the chef module or maybe add a separate flag to the module to use the systems hostname rather than the identity or the hostname (localhost) cloud-init thinks we are using.

Hopefully there is another way around this which I have missed so far.