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

Sun Feb 17 02:18:26 PST 2008

Quoting David Alban (extasia at extasia.org):

> having a unique id for each host means that i can with confidence know
> that i've processed a particular host in a set of hosts.  say i have
> host foo.bar.bat.

Yes, the merit in that is obvious.  However, based on the little I've
seen, hostid doesn't appear to qualify as a guaranteed globally unique
host ID -- definitely not on Linux, and I have my doubts about other
*ixes, as well.

You might be better off using, say, hashes of sshd host keys.  (Some of
your hosts might not run an sshd.  You could fix that.  Or not.  ;->  )

-- 
Cheers,                                      "Reality is not optional."
Rick Moen                                             -- Thomas Sowell
rick at linuxmafia.com