hostid gives identical values on all FC machines

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:

> Matthew Saltzman wrote:
> > The primary (eth0 in Linux) that the machine shipped with (not so
> > unreasonable for Suns), or that was installed at the time the license key
> > was generated.  An alternative might be a hard disk serial number, except
> > that low-level system calls are probably needed in order to get it.
>
> The only solution would be generating /etc/hostid during install.  It
> can be populated by last four bytes of eth0 (as detected during
> install), or some randomly generated bytes (if there's no network
> interfaces detected during install).
>
> Of course, there's still problem what to return if user deletes
> /etc/hostid file ;-)

And for a license manager that depends on it to identify the machine,
there's the problem of users copying /etc/hostid from machine to machine,
not to mention the fact that there's nothing stopping the distro from
generating the same /etc/hostid for every installation.

Conclusion: Using the hostid to identify a machine is silly.  Why do
proprietary licensing systems persist in doing so?

-- 
		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs