Well, the funnier thing is...Observium can't talk to anything without IP so this argument doesn’t go very far.  Look, I'm not challenging the religion of Observium. I actually don’t mind that it wants to use hostnames.  Its cleaner and clearer.  But it’s a false argument that Observium doesn’t use IP addresses.

Several functions are going to great lengths to obtain the piece of information.  It just needs to be recorded and displayed.

[root@observium includes]# grep -nr 'gethostbyname*'
common.inc.php:2736:// Same as gethostbyname(), but work with both IPv4 and IPv6
common.inc.php:2740:// For get only IPv6 record use gethostbyname6($hostname, OBS_DNS_AAAA)
common.inc.php:2743:function gethostbyname6($host, $flags = OBS_DNS_ALL)
common.inc.php:2750:  $dns = gethostbynamel6($host, $flags);
common.inc.php:2759:// Same as gethostbynamel(), but work with both IPv4 and IPv6
common.inc.php:2761:// for get only IPv6 addresses use gethostbynamel6($hostname, OBS_DNS_AAAA)
common.inc.php:2764:function gethostbynamel6($host, $flags = OBS_DNS_ALL)
functions.inc.php:346:        $ip      = gethostbyname6($new, $flags);
functions.inc.php:587:      $ip       = gethostbyname6($hostname, $flags);
functions.inc.php:919:      $ip = gethostbyname6($hostname);
functions.inc.php:1082:    $ip = ($try_a ? gethostbyname($hostname) : FALSE); // Do not check IPv4 if transport IPv6
functions.inc.php:1087:      $ip = gethostbyname6($hostname, OBS_DNS_AAAA);
functions.inc.php:1208:  return (TRUE && gethostbyname6($hostname, $flags));
discovery/functions.inc.php:49:      $ip = gethostbyname6($hostname, $flags);
discovery/functions.inc.php:108:              $snmp_ip = gethostbyname6($snmphost, $flags);
discovery/functions.inc.php:119:                $ptr_ip = gethostbyname6($ptr, $flags);
discovery/.svn/text-base/functions.inc.php.svn-base:49:      $ip = gethostbyname6($hostname, $flags);
discovery/.svn/text-base/functions.inc.php.svn-base:108:              $snmp_ip = gethostbyname6($snmphost, $flags);
discovery/.svn/text-base/functions.inc.php.svn-base:119:                $ptr_ip = gethostbyname6($ptr, $flags);

-----Original Message-----
From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Tom Laermans
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2016 11:32 PM
To: Observium Network Observation System <observium@observium.org>
Subject: Re: [Observium] Small feature request

Well, the funny thing is.. Observium doesn't use an IP to query the device on.

See what can of worms you opened? ;-)

Tom

On 08/11/2016 05:52, Michael wrote: