Host ID.

[Pawel Jakub Dawidek]

Hi.

After initial discussion on IRC, I'd like to propose an addition...
I want to use it with ZFS, but I thought it may be useful in general, so
here it goes:

I'd like to assign a unique ID to the system on first boot.

When system starts, /etc/rc.d/hostid script checks if /hostid file
exists, if it doesn't, it creates it via 'uuidgen > /hostid'.

It will also set kern.hostuuid sysctl to this value and first four bytes
of MD5(kern.hostuuid) will be stored in kern.hostid. It will allow to
use gethostid(3).

If root file system is read-only, different uuid will be genrated on
each boot. Not sure if anything better can be done here.

As I said, I think it may be genrally useful. Imagine using it with
magic/variant symlinks, for example.

Comments?

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.wheel.pl
pjd at FreeBSD.org                           http://www.FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!
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