Strange behaviour of hostid ?

Andrew Mather mathera at gmail.com
Fri May 13 02:24:22 UTC 2005


Hi,

I've got another hostid question, but this time it's a different problem.

We have a piece of software which uses the value returned by hostid in
generation of the license key.  Last time I mentioned this, there was
some discussion about the merits (or otherwise) of this approach, but
leaving those arguments aside, the software does it this way, so I
have to live with it  ;-)

My past problem was solved with the help of the list by modifying the
/etc/hosts file and putting the hostname on a line with its correct
IP, rather than the default setting, which had it on the same line as
localhost (127.0.0.1).  This meant hostid returned a 'proper' and
unique value for the license key generation.

Anyway...I've just run up two more Opteron machines, using FC3 for
x86_64 and have edited the hosts file as before.

Now, if I run hostid, I get unique values, however they look very
different to those on any of my other machines (a mix of Rh 7, 9, FC2
and FC3 on i386 and x86_64).

The latest lot have the form:  ffffffff809d3f8e, whereas previous ones
were like: 809d288e

Looks like the last part of the number is correct, but what about all
those leading f's ?

My question is, are these normal, valid values ?

If not, any idea what could be causing this ?

Thanks,
Andrew




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