[NTLUG:Discuss] Host ID

[Steve Baker]

Justin M. Forbes wrote:
> Actually sun uses the mac address of the primary nic, since most are 
> onboard, this does not change, but if you replace the board with the 
> primary nic on a 4500, etc, you will change your hostid, which also 
> disables your veritas licenses and causes quite a mess.  The exception 
> to this is the E10K, which uses a hostid generated for the box via 
> eeprom code (IE sun support), and loaded per domian through the ssp and 
> control board.

On some of the SGI ONYX machines, there was actually a backdoor way to
change the unique ID - it was kept very secret though because unscrupulous
people could change all their machines to have the same ID and then purchase
one copy of software and run it everywhere.

I guess they did that so that field service could swap out the board with
the ID on it and change the number on the replacement to match.

Unfortunately, there was an occasional glitch on the machine that corrupted
the unique ID to all zeroes and SGI field service went and 'leaked' the
backdoor trick to customers so we could fix it ourselves and save them
a visit.

...Naughty, naughty!

----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
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