On Wed, 15 Dec 2004, Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote: > Matthew Saltzman wrote: > > But MAC address is not bad (though, of course, anything can be forged with > > more or less effort). Solaris generates the hostid from the MAC address > > of the primary NIC. > > If we are talking about Sparc machines, the above statement is not true. > Sparc has actual hostid stored in PROM chip. Hostid is stored in > bytes 1, c, d and e, while MAC address is stored in bytes 2-7 of this > chip. Byte 1 of hostid is machine type (don't touch it), and the > remaining three bytes (also called serial number) you can set to preatty > much anything you want. Hostid command will simply read out those bytes > form PROM chip and display them on the screen. MAC address is sometimes > set to be identical to hostid, but it can be different (not stored in > same location on the chip). You can also set it to preatty much Ah, thanks for the additional information. On SPARCs I've looked at, the remaining bytes were always identical to bytes from the MAC address--hence my misperception. > anything you want (but some Sun boxes will complain if first three bytes > are not set to 08:00:20). Don't forget to recalculate and store new > checksum into byte f, or you'll be in deep poop. > > Luckily, there's port of Fedora Core for Sparc machines, which makes the > above not totally off topic ;-) > > -- Matthew Saltzman Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
