3 ms·

I have to know: Why a hash function of the hostname?

• toomuchtodo 12y ago
  No hash collisions, hostnames (in almost all practical environments) are never identical.
• pliu 12y ago
  The chef-client cookbook does a similar thing in its cron recipe: # Generate a uniformly distributed unique number to sleep. if node['chef_client']['splay'].to_i > 0 checksum = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(node['fqdn'] || 'unknown-hostname') sleep_time = checksum.to_s.hex % node['chef_client']['splay'].to_i else sleep_time = nil end https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/chef-client/blob/master/recipes/cron.rb#L72 https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/chef-client/blob/master... This is random enough so you won't kill the server, and deterministic so the resource isn't always changing every Chef run.
• jldugger 12y ago
  It's more or less random, but stable.