On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 12:32:04PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
* Petter Reinholdtsen:
Something like this should work, I guess:
if [ ! -f /etc/hostid ]; then
if [ -e /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid ]; then
sethostidfromuuid $(cat /sys/class/dmi/id/product_uuid)
else
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1 count=4 of=/etc/hostid 2>/dev/null
fi
fi
That's not very different from /etc/machine-id, isn't it?
We need to figure out how to transform the UUID to a 32 bit integer,
of course.
And I think this is the crux of the problem. Whatever we do, with
today's cluster sizes it's just not reliably unique.
You could use /etc/machine-id instead. Some effort goes into that to
make it actually unique.
DMI data seems risky because it depends on firmware, and there are so
many firmware bugs out there. It would also not address the matter of
changing host IDs as the result of host migrations.
Yes, this seems a quixotic quest. In historic terms, this was mostly
used on systems that actually had some kind of serial number burned onto
the mainboard; it's fairly useless in the absence of that kind of
controlled environment. Many systems these days actually do have that
sort of ID, e.g., via dmi/smbios, but 1) it's not guaranteed to be there
2) it's unlikely to fit in a 32 bit int.
Other platforms have deprecated gethostid, that's the best way forward for
linux, IMO. This proposal doesn't fix the problem generally and actually
changes the semantics of the call. (It was originally expected that the
value would remain constant independent of a particular OS installation,
which is not a property of a value stored on disk.) The main users of
hostid (that I'm aware of) tended to be commercial software vendors
locking licenses to systems--and they typically didn't use gethostid on
linux because it was useless for the purpose. So I'm not aware of a
userbase for this call on linux, and nobody should be using it for new
development. If you need a stable unique id then you should be using
something like the dmi uuid *and you need to have hardware from a vendor
that sets such a property*.
If you want something tied to the OS instance rather than the machine,
then use /etc/machine-id (and gnash your teeth at the misnomer) rather
than reinventing it.
Mike Stone
