On 3/1/07, Margot H. Miller <Margot.Miller at sun.com> wrote:
>  -  hostid was never meant to be used by third parties for licensing schemes.
>    How prevalent is the use of this for licensing?

Seems to be the most common mechanism that I have seen.

> -  Besides the use of hostid for licensing, what other ways is it
>    being used by third parties?

As a primary key in various server automation tools.

> -  What does hostid really mean?  Is hostid a chassis identifier or just a
>    software installation instance identifier?

The uses I have seen it for are as a chassis identifier.  Because of
licensing issues[1], it would be really nice to have a documented and
supported way of changing the hostid.

[1] Consider the hypothetical case of a SPARC 20 running Solaris
2.5.1.  It is the license server for an application where the vendor
is no longer in business.  How do I get onto supported hardware and OS
without breaking my app?  (I know how to do it, but it should be a
procedure that is available on Sunsolve or docs.sun.com, not just web
sites that are blocked by the corporate proxy because they distribute
"hacking" tools.)

> -  Currently there is one hostid per box.  Should we allow different hostids
>    for every Solaris zone on the same box?

Ideally this would be as simple as "set hostid=...".  If not set it
should use the hostid of the global zone.

-- 
Mike Gerdts
http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/

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