When there is a network issue that prevents DNS names from being
resolved, it can be difficult to troubleshoot. For example, last night,
the Samba domain controller crashed, so *pyrocufflink.blue* names were
unavailable. Furthermore, the domain controller VM was apparently
locked up, so I could not SSH into it directly, and it needed to be
rebooted. Since the VM host's name did not resolve, I could not find
its address to log into it and reboot the VM. I resorted to scanning
the SSH keys of every IP address on the network until I found the one
that matched the cached key in ~/.ssh/known_hosts. This was cumbersome
and annoying.
Assigning DHCP reservations to the VM hosts will ensure that when a
situation like this arises again, I can quickly connect to the correct
VM host and manage its virtual machines, as its address is recorded in
the configuration policy.
Dustin
90421e77d2