[baylisa] Re: wtf: hostid gives '0' as a hostid

Thu Feb 14 21:29:24 PST 2008

Quoting David Alban (extasia at extasia.org):

> interesting.  that means that a host whose primary ip addr is 10.0.0.5
> may have the same hostid as lots of other hosts around the world.
> good thing we can't get to those other 10.0.0.5 machines...

I know of no implications of the hostid value for networking.  Maybe I'm
wrong about this (you tell me), but I get the somewhat fuzzy impression
that its main use is in licensing managers for proprietary *ix software.
At least, that's what appears implied in many of the discussions I
find.  It seems most used on HP/UX and Solaris, and I see questions
about its use and underlying algorithms on Linux only about twice a
decade.  (I frankly couldn't even remember how it worked, which is why
I had to play around with ifconfig and bc.)