gethostid anyone?

[Chris January]

> Anyone interested in implementing a working gethostid?  It should be
> trivial to have it returned a munged IP address like linux but it
> might be more interesting if it returned something more unique than
> that.
>
> I was playing around with uuidgen to see if that could be used to
> generate something unique but it creates too many bits.  I thought
> it might be interesting to use it to seed a /etc/hostid file, though.
>
> Anyway, this would be a good project for anyone interested in contributing
> something.  It would also remove an XFAIL from the test suite.

I could probably come up with a patch for this.
How about using a hash of the following items:
1. Processor serial no. (if available)
2. MAC address of first ethernet card (if available)
3. Windows product id
4. Capacity of drive C:
5. Anything else lying around.

There would need to be an option to turn this off however as some privacy
freaks would probably complain despite the hashing.

Chris