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This couldn’t have been better timed for me.

I sit with a pile of raspberry Pis I throw into different rooms about the house and want to stick assorted tasks on them. My open question was how can I just image them, plug them in and centrally configure what runs on them with no more sd card or Mac detection shenanigans when I change their job.

I’ll be giving this a try!

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If lldp proves inconvenient, pi's also have a unique cpu-id, which can be found in /proc/cpuinfo

I think something similar exists on most processors

How does cpu-id map to physical location? If I move it from a closet on the first floor, to a rack in the basement, how does knowing the cpu-id help?

You would use CPU id by having the vanilla image display its ID (or perhaps some more humanly readable derived name) until assigned something to display. It won't know that it's moved, that's an advantage of the port method.

I mentioned it because the OP was going to use Mac addresses in a similar way, and only didn't because the Mac addresses of her machines were unstable.

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