[Richard Laager] > For example, if you want to use the low 32-bits of /etc/machine-id, > that would work too. It'd mean carrying a patch on Debian, but if the > pain of a patch and different behavior is less than the benefits of > the change, go for it.
I guess we would have to verify that /etc/machine-id is available in the initrd for this to work with / in zfs. But I guess that is a problem with /etc/hostid too for gethostid(). :) While researching this topic I came across <URL: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9258228/how-to-prevent-gethostid-from-doing-dns-lookups-on-linux > which report that gethostid() might lock up a program if the DNS server become unavailable. A scary scenario just to get the machine ID. I also came across <URL: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/ids.html >, which provide a very useful list of possible IDs to use in addition to the gethostid() value. It agrees that gethostid() have unclear sematics. :) -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen