I think it would be a *terrible* idea for observium to work without dns.

the fact that bofh Adam has pretty much forced it, is a very welcome sledgehammer against the sloppiness of incomplete node deployment habits.

ditto with pingability imo.

just be glad he didn't make A and PTR records have to match each other (and ^sysName$ too!) ... or at least have an extant PTR, something that is often overlooked.

count your lucky stars; the only reason he probably didn't (yet?) is that it might have slowed things down a smidge.

/grin/

worse, he could have run through checks against the entireties of rfcs 1122 and 1123, or also compared sysLocation against a LOC record query, before a node gets accepted.

ps … perhaps some CNAME wrangling might work suitably for your case.  

split-horizon views in bind would do the trick for sure.

for inspiration, have a chew through
  http://backreference.org/2010/02/01/geolocation-aware-dns-with-bind/

cheers,

R.


On 2013-08-08, at 4:26 AM, observium-request@observium.org wrote:

I think it would be a good idea if it's possible to use observium without
dns, or to overwrite the hostname used to get snmp data.
I have some devices with internal and external IP adresses, and I'd like to
use the internal IP for polling, but the external hostname for the device
itself.

Comments?