It would be useful if the MGS did not store NIDs in the configuration records at all, rather than the current use of static IP addresses, so that the servers are able to have relatively dynamic IP addresses (assigned at boot time, not necessarily changing at runtime).

The clients can already locate the MGS by a hostname, since mount.lustre will do DNS (or /etc/hosts) name resolution at mount time before initiating the MGC->MGS connection. However, the config llog records currently only store static IP addresses (NIDs, actually) because the config log is processed in the kernel, which did not have any DNS name resolution capabilities at the time of implementation.

It should be noted that the config records mostly store the client NID in ASCII format (e.g. 192.168.20.1@tcp), though there is also a binary lnet_nid_t in at least one case. It may be relatively straight-forward to store an ASCII hostname@net record in place of the numeric NID in the config records, and then do hostname->IP resolution in the kernel during config log processing before passing the NID to the LNet layer.

With LU-10360 allowing the use of IR logs from the MGS to advertise server NIDs to clients, it seems possible to remove the use of NIDs in the client config llog entirely and simplify configuration.