Unlike Sun's SPARC systems, X86 boxes do not have a unique hardware hostid. Solaris generates a software identifier for X86 boxes during a Sun install while hostid is in NVRAM on SPARC systems.
With Solaris now being open sourced and with many blogs explaining X86 hostid generation (see the well written blogs.sun.com/ambiguous/category/OpenSolaris) as well as being able to use dtrace to change the hostid, we were proposing replacing the current X86 implementation of hostid with a much more simpler interface- still generating a hostid on x86 via software (since there is no universal x86 hardware feature to tie hostid to) and storing it in a an ascii file /etc/hostid. The current implementation is pretty complex but is a not a secure mechanism. Thinking about changing the underlying implementation of hostid on X86 boxes has led to some interesting issues, that I would like to explore more with the OpenSolaris community: - hostid was never meant to be used by third parties for licensing schemes. How prevalent is the use of this for licensing? - Besides the use of hostid for licensing, what other ways is it being used by third parties? - What does hostid really mean? Is hostid a chassis identifier or just a software installation instance identifier? - Currently there is one hostid per box. Should we allow different hostids for every Solaris zone on the same box? Thanks Margot Hackett Miller This message posted from opensolaris.org
