[NTLUG:Discuss] Host ID

[Justin M. Forbes]

Actually sun uses the mac address of the primary nic, since most are 
onboard, this does not change, but if you replace the board with the 
primary nic on a 4500, etc, you will change your hostid, which also 
disables your veritas licenses and causes quite a mess.  The exception 
to this is the E10K, which uses a hostid generated for the box via 
eeprom code (IE sun support), and loaded per domian through the ssp and 
control board.

Justin

Steve Baker wrote:

> Fred James wrote:
>
>> Well, actually I'm not sure what good that is since I get exactly 
>> that same number on each of two Linux machines here (i.e., between us 
>> so far we have three machines with the same hostid number).  But, 
>> maybe someone else has a better idea.
>
>
> I guess the big question is "What do you want this for?" - some machines
> (SGI and Sun machines for example) have an utterly unique number burned
> into a chip somewhere that generates a totally unique ID that's often
> used to node-lock software, to verify the machine's identity for 
> maintenance
> contract work and things like that.
>
> PC's (in general) don't have that - and software that needs to 
> node-lock has
> to use the NIC Ethernet address - which is unique - but changes when 
> you upgrade
> or replace your NIC.  The big problem with PC's is that wherever you 
> put that
> unique ID code, there is a good chance that someone will upgrade that 
> part
> and find that nothing works anymore.
>
> Microsoft try to get around that by tying together your CPU type, your
> RAM size, various device ID's *and* your NIC and allow one or two of 
> those
> to change and still see this as the 'same' computer...however, that's
> notoriously flakey.
>
> I'd bet that the NIC address is 'good enough' for most purposes...so, the
> big question is: What is this *for*?
>
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