Lyle Merdan writes:
> So as part of my support organizations procedure to gather customer info for
> troubleshooting I was planning on using the hostid as a unique serial number
> to identify a system as I may be collecting data from a customer over a long
> span of time that may span multiple OS installs, and it may be necessary to
> go back through a hosts history to see if issues possibly existed in previous
> OS installs...
If it needs to be unique, I think your plan may have problems. The
hostid(1) man page says only this:
The hostid command prints the identifier of the current host
in hexadecimal. This numeric value is likely to differ when
hostid is run on a different machine.
It intentionally doesn't say "unique." There are no hard guarantees
that it actually is unique or that (for a given system) it remains
unchanging or is administratively unchangeable over time.
If your application can tolerate the idea that hostid has imperfect
semantics, then it might be "good enough" for this use. But if you
require guarantees, you won't find them here.
> What are you currently thinking of doing for the hostid on X86 platforms now
> that a few months have passed?
That the hardware platforms don't necessarily support it ... ?
--
James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com>
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