Gotta start somewhere ... how many of us are really out there?

[User Freebsd]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006, Xiao-Yong Jin wrote:

> Chris Whitehouse <chris at childeric.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
>
>> Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
>>> Counting portsnap and cvsup accesses is non-intrusive - i.e. nothing
>>> sent from local host - will count systems from any version of
>>> FreeBSD, but will never count everything because sites with multiple
>>> hosts may easily have local propagation mechanisms.  But you will
>>> get an order of magnitude.  However, how do you deal with systems
>>> with variable IPs?  I don't know enough about the internals of
>>> either portsnap or cvsup to know if there is some kind of unique id
>>> associated with hosts.  If not, then you'd wildly over count for
>>> many home-based, variable IP systems.
>>
>> Maybe not so many, my non-static ip hasn't changed since I signed up 3
>> years ago despite turning off the modem for the odd day or
>> two. Another network I look after also hasn't changed in a year.
>>
> But one can't rely on that.  You'll definitely see more than one ip
> associated with my laptop, if I move it around.
>
> A more reliable way that I can think of is generating a unique ID
> number when a system finishes installation or upon the first boot.
> However, it may involve some additional privacy problem.  What do you
> think?

How does Solaris generate its 'hostid'?  Is it a hardware/sparc thing, or 
software?

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Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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