Re: Workaround for hostid on Darwin 8/MacPPC

[C. Speare]

Ok, a (hopefully) better idea.

If the value of id is 0, don't return anything and exit with EXIT_FAILURE.
That maintains consistency and makes the user aware that something is 
seriously broken. [By the same view, returning a well-known value, like 
0xdeadbeef or similar, could serve the same purpose; it seems more 
cautious to not return anything, though.]

For my purposes, it is enough that I can set the hostid via a sysctl, and 
hostid will function just fine:

ppc7447% hostid
00000000
ppc7447% sudo sysctl -w kern.hostid=0xcafe0def
kern.hostid: 0 -> 3405647343
ppc7447% hostid
cafe0def
ppc7447% hostid --version
hostid (GNU coreutils) 6.9

So, I can get around a broken hostid - the responsbility of coming up with 
a consistent [and hopefully unique] hostid is now on the administrator [or 
OS vendor].


On Thu, 3 May 2007, John Cowan wrote:

> C. Speare scripsit:
>
> > A possible (but weak)  workaround is to test for the case where id is 0.
>
> It's fine to detect that case, but the whole idea of hostid is to
> return the same value each time it's called on the same host,
> so returning a random value is unhelpful.
>
> --
> Work hard,                                      John Cowan
> play hard,                                      address@hidden
> die young,                                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> rot quickly.