Hi all,
I have a customer who wants their hostnames on a large group of AOS-CX 6100 switches to be dynamic. They will be part of a Central Template Group. They have a legitimate reason to move switches around occasionally, and there are many hundreds of them and they want to remove as much admin overhead as possible.
I tested the below config in a template:
hostname customer_name-%_sys_serial%
...and this works great. However, it requires that a variable file be uploaded to the group when new switches are purchased with the mandatory _sys_lan_mac and _sys_serial variables.
I thought I had tested this with several switches in earlier versions (2.5.4 and 2.5.5) of Central without uploading variable files. But after reading the following statement re: variables:
"Variables are associated to a device and not to a group. If you move a device between groups, variables remain with the device."
...I wonder if I tested this functionality with switches already onboarded to another Central group at some stage.
Is it possible to use the mandatory _sys_serial and _sys_lan_mac variables in the config template without adding them as variables first?
It feels like it should be possible. I say this because if I remove the variables from the template itself, the switch syncs the configuration without issues. From this point onward, I can add the variables back to the template, and the switch will happily pull the config, including the dynamic hostname (with the serial number appended). So why does Central not know about the fixed variables before the switch has applied some form of config first?
Any ideas?
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Regards,
Brett V
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