Host ID.

[Christian Brueffer]

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 07:08:18PM +0400, Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
> On 4/7/07, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 05:07:25PM +0400, Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
> >> - Is Windows-style hardware ID's hashing totally ruled out?
> >
> >I know nothing about it...
> 
> Well, maybe something like hashing MAC of the first NIC
> to get the initial ID... But then there's always the
> probability that we initialize several systems putting
> the same NIC into each of them...
> 
> >> - How does it work in other OS'es? (e.g. solaris /bin/hostid)
> >
> >On OpenSolaris, if I understand the code right, hostid is derived from
> >hw_serial, and hw_serial is taken from:
> >
> > * On sparc machines, read hw_serial from the firmware at boot time
> > * and simply assert Sun is the hardware provider.  Hmm.
> >[...]
> > * On x86 machines, read hw_serial, hw_provider and srpc_domain from
> > * /etc/bootrc at boot time.
> 
> There's even a business [1] selling software to change
> Solaris hostid for £49. Should I squat freebsdhostid.com? :)
> 
> [1] http://www.solarishostid.com/
> 
> Anyway, other systems also have a notion of hostid. It
> appears from this linux manpage that hostid was there
> in 4.2BSD, but got removed in 4.4BSD:
> 
> http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man2/gethostid.2.html

Indeed, our gethostid(4) manpage says the same ;-)

- Christian

-- 
Christian Brueffer	chris at unixpages.org	brueffer at FreeBSD.org
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