🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug18.153253.3473@midway.uchicago.edu>  
eer1@midway.uchicago.edu(Paul Woods) writes:
> Hi -
> 
>  Last week I posted to .sysadmin and I received a couple of responses to  
the  
> following question (none of them were detailed enough).  The HostID on a  
NeXT  
> can be changed ( At least that is what I have been told ) and I need to  
be able  
> to change it on several of my NeXT's.  HOW DO I PATCH THE OS SO THAT IT  
WILL  
> ALLOW ME TO CHANGE THE HOSTID.  I am not a programmer (not really  
anyway) so  
> please keep it on a very simple level.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Paul-

Hi Paul.  You can't change the hostid of a Sun or a NeXT.  (Unless there  
is some sort of magical system patch to do it). I missed your previous  
posting so I don't really understand why you would want to.
 
Some people may have read the man page on the "hostid" command and been  
mislead.  The man page says you can change it.  It then refers to the  
gethostid(2) call for more info.  In that man page it states that the  
hostid is permanent and unique for every machine.  It currently returns a  
4-byte integer with the first byte set to 1, and the last three bytes set  
to the last three bytes of the ethernet address of your machine (which are  
guaranteed to be unique).

The system call sethostid(2) doesn't really seem to work (there's no man  
page for it either).  In generic BSD I assume it is possible to set your  
hostid.  In fact I know it is on some machines - I've done it.  However  
the fixed hostid scheme makes a lot more sense to me as it can be used to  
identify a particular CPU and be guaranteed it will never change.  Many  
licensing schemes make use of this.

--
David A. Ross, Programmer Analyst  | dave@nakiska.ucs.ualberta.ca
Computing and Network Services     |  (NeXTmail accepted)
352 Gen Serv Bldg, Univ of Alberta | Phone: (403) 492-9339
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada  T6G 2H1 | Fax:   (403) 492-1729