# Ansible equivalent for puppet's fqdn\_rand()

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-equivalent-for-puppets-fqdn-rand/20826>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [March 10, 2016, 12:11pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-equivalent-for-puppets-fqdn-rand/20826 "2016-03-10T12:11:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Paul\_Totterman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Paul\_Totterman](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Paul_Totterman)\
**Post date:** [March 10, 2016, 12:11pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-equivalent-for-puppets-fqdn-rand/20826/1 "2016-03-10T12:11:30Z")

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Hi,

I’d like for cron entries to be run at different minutes based on e.g. hostname (would be nice to be easy to pick the seed). In puppet I would use fqdn\_rand(). The best I could find for ansible is [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33379378/idempotence-and-random-variables-in-ansible](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33379378/idempotence-and-random-variables-in-ansible) . Wouldn’t it make sense for this to be available as a jinja filter?

Cheers,  
Paul

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Paul\_Totterman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3ec8ea/32.png) [@Paul\_Totterman](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Paul_Totterman)\
**Post date:** [March 22, 2016, 10:44am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-equivalent-for-puppets-fqdn-rand/20826/2 "2016-03-22T10:44:42Z")

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[https://gist.github.com/ptman/9bd8223272e2c0e27b2b](https://gist.github.com/ptman/9bd8223272e2c0e27b2b)

Cheers,  
Paul