gethostid anyone?

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 12:01:20AM -0000, Chris January wrote:
> > 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.

What about just returning 0?  According to SUSv3:

"The gethostid() function shall retrieve a 32-bit identifier for the
 current host."

and

"This volume of IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 does not define the domain in which
the return value is unique."

so the domain could be validly restricted to the current host!

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Developer                                mailto:cygwin@cygwin.com
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