Host ID.

[Michael.G.Williams at nokia.com]

How about considering mobile devices? Also, the IEEE has 802.21 which is
defining an media independent ID, and also 802.1 which has a secure ID
(see 802.1ae and .1af)

Best Regards,
Michael 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-arch at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-arch at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Pawel Jakub Dawidek
Sent: Saturday, April 07, 2007 10:55 AM
To: Pawel Worach
Cc: freebsd-arch at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Host ID.

On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 06:47:41PM +0200, Pawel Worach wrote:
> Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:
> >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?
> 
> What about ...
> 
> # kenv smbios.system.uuid
> 63F8BC81-475C-11CB-A074-CA3B9005F8F6
> 
> Not all systems have SMBIOSen but maybe it can be used instead of
/{,etc}/hostid if available ?

We thought about this, but as you noted it's not always available. I
want this to behave the same on each system.

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