AWS has a very useful tool where you can make a simple query to a URL and get information about the current instance. This is helpful for automation because you can get meta data about a node automatically. Combined with facter and puppet creates a very useful way of identifying nodes. Having a similar feature at Linode would be nice as well, and it would be helpful to have information such as the data center, linode size, parent host, etc.

Well, there's the Linode API.

http://www.linode.com/api/?method=linode.list

That method will list nodes with details about them.

+1

My use case: Ohai, which is a platform-agnostic mechanism to profile a system and emit JSON. This is a fundamental component of chef.

Being able to automatically detect public and private IPs from a "cold start," without an API key, would allow for an Ohai plugin to be written (along the lines of EC2 and Rackspace Cloud). This could then be used to automagically bootstrap systems, without Linode-specific deployment tricks.

Another use case: a StackScript ditty to set up /etc/network/interfaces with all public and private IPs

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I know this is an ancient topic but anyone know if this ever came about? A certain Linode competitor just announced such a service which is very nice to have....