🚀 go-pugleaf

Thinking about it, there seems to be three ways to change your hostid:

1) Fix the system call entry table so that the entry for the
sethostid() system call points to the actual code, rather than the
subroutine which returns an error.

2) Write a program to open /dev/kmem, seek to the right place, and
then write over the spot in kernel memory that the gethostid() system
call grabs the hostid from.

3) Patch the shared C library so that rather than invoking the
gethostid() system call, it just returns in D0 whatever number you
like.

I know the first two methods have been tried; I don't know about the
third.  Much of this would be unnecessary if two things were done:

- The ethernet address/hostid was on a socketed, removeable ROM which
could be easily moved from one CPU board to another when they are
repaired.

- It wasn't as much a pain in the $#@% to maintain and register
software that depends on using hostids as copy protection.  I think
that this mechanism needs to be replaced with something like a public
key cryptosystem scheme that would be useful for other things, too.

louie