On Thursday, 03/28/2002 at 08:17 CST, Rick Troth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > When I said it should be "retooled" > what I meant was that for some HW platforms (like zSeries) > there is a hardware concept of a processor serial number. > On such platforms, 'hostid' should report that value > or should report something derived from it > and not something derived from IP address or file content. > > Perhaps I've misunderstood the purpose of the 'hostid' command.
There's really no value to hostid or gethostid() because the result is not well-defined across platforms. gethostid() was useful in olden days to find out your own IP address (forget multihomed hosts) so you could answer the question "Did the connection originate on this host or somewhere else?". The fact that we're having this discussion illustrates the problem. If we don't agree on the semantics of the data, it has limited value. Enter IPv6, stage right. For those systems on which gethostid() returns an IP address, what should they do if they have only IPv6 IP addresses? The hostid is a 32-bit number. Rats. And I agree with Alan Cox that things like get-me-a-world-unique-64-bit-number() should be obtained by something other than the gethostid(). Make such a call part of the POSIX standard or something. It's not a networking thing. gethostid(), for better or worse, is. Regards, Alan Altmark Sr. Software Engineer IBM z/VM Development
