>I'll gladly write the code myself... which bit of the sysctl MIB should I
>put such a beast in, though? I'm not sure what POSIX has to say about such
>stuff. I see that kern.hostid seems to be 0 on x86 but has some kind of
>value (1469743693) on my sparc box - is this the beginnings of what I
>want? It seems to be writable. If it is, then I don't need to hack a new
>sysctl into the kernel. Then again, it seems only to be 32 bits :-( The
>variable is defined as "long hostid", and is treated as an int for the
>sysctl.

sparcs (suns?) get the hostid bits from the hostid prom on the
motherboard.  i remember being frustrated by this when a motherboard
would die, get replaces, and the bozos who did the swap didn't swap
the old prom to the new board rendereing "licenced" sunos or solaris
software "dead".

i believe it only supplies 32 bits, and if you set it via sysctl, it
will not be persistant (ie, you'd have to stuff the bits you wanted in
/etc/sysctl.conf...or make your own prom :).

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