> Unlike Sun's SPARC systems, X86 boxes do not have a > unique hardware hostid. > Solaris generates a software identifier for X86 boxes > during a Sun install while > hostid is in NVRAM on SPARC systems. > > With Solaris now being open sourced and with many > blogs explaining > X86 hostid generation (see the well written > blogs.sun.com/ambiguous/category/OpenSolaris) > as well as being able to use dtrace to change > the hostid, we were proposing replacing the current > X86 implementation > of hostid with a much more simpler interface- still > generating a hostid > on x86 via software (since there is no universal x86 > hardware feature to > tie hostid to) and storing it in a an ascii file > /etc/hostid. The > current implementation is pretty complex but is a not > a secure mechanism. > > Thinking about changing the underlying implementation > of hostid on X86 > boxes has led to some interesting issues, that I > would like to explore > more with the OpenSolaris community: > > - hostid was never meant to be used by third > parties for licensing schemes. > How prevalent is the use of this for licensing?
ISTR FlexLM based licensing schemes using hostid (quite common). I think maybe whatever FrameMaker used to use (which wasn't FlexLM) may do this too, but can't remember. (the latter had a problem in that if client and license server resolved the name of the client differently, the license server would have some sort of problems; I'd worked around that once with an LD_PRELOADable routine on the client wrapping gethostname() with something that would return a result guaranteed to be resolvable on the license server, or as a last resort, an IP address; that was good enough for the problem, and nothing else needed to load that). > - Besides the use of hostid for licensing, what > other ways is it > being used by third parties? > What does hostid really mean? Is hostid a chassis > identifier or just a > software installation instance identifier? > - Currently there is one hostid per box. Should we > allow different hostids > for every Solaris zone on the same box? Well...there appear to be different hostids for each domain of a x800 (SunFire) system; not quite sure how they're generated, but I think the SC downloads the openboot and pseudo eeprom contents to the domains. The SC's platform hostid seems to correspond to one of the domains, while the other domain's hostids may be that with some of the low-order bits changed? No idea what the sun4v will do once full PROM support for LDOMs is available; perhaps you want to keep that in mind, in the hopes of some semblance of consistency. OTOH, I think the question of what to do with hostid for zones depends on two uses that might be made of hostids: licensing and resource tracking. Perhaps cheaper licenses might become available if hostids were different per zone, not unlike Oracle allowing a less expensive license for an instance in a zone that was bound to a processor set. Or alternatively, some greedy folks might want you to buy a license for each zone! And as for resource tracking, does one want to track the hardware or the operating environment? How much resource tracking (other than license control) is bound to hostid in commercial vs open source vs locally written software? etc > hanks > Margot Hackett Miller This message posted from opensolaris.org
