* Michael Stone <mst...@debian.org> [190808 12:34]: > I guess I need you to say what's confusing. It's an ID that doesn't change. > You can look up gethostid to get a little more background. If you need an ID
First, let me say that I am not trying to be intentionally obtuse. I am really interested to know what programs, more specifically, what services in a "typical" installation, actually use machine-id (for one or more definitions of "typical", e.g. desktop or server). What prompted my question was that someone earlier in this thread stated that when he removed this file the system became unbootable (I think it was a banana pi). What part of the boot process fails? What other things that are commonly installed on some large class of machines are going to fail if this is either missing or identical to ten other machines on the same network that I cloned from the same image? Marc's comment that systemd-networkd fails is a good partial answer. The fact that the man page belongs to the systemd package is another good clue, but not an answer. Was this file added as part of systemd because it was believed that gethostid(3) was insufficient? If so, what parts of systemd use it? ...Marvin