University Computing Systems

Systems Administration - Changing the hostid on a Solaris (sparc) system

General Information

The hostid is a unique numeric identifyier which is used by license daemons to
indentify a system.  The hostid is stored in a system’s NVRAM chip
located on the system board.  

The three license servers in use by UCS have the following hostids :

	ucslic1 : 80fe52c0
	ucslic2 : 80fe4183
	ucslic3 : 80feaa33

If a license server fails due to a hardware problem and is replaced with a
new system, the replacement system will have a new hostid, which will 
prevent the license daemons from starting correctly.  In order for the
replacement system to serve as a license server, its hostid will need to be
changed accordingly.

Changing the hostid

The hostid can be changed on a system using the hid2_64 program.  The change
does not persist across reboots, so a script will need to be added into
/etc/init.d to set the correct hostid on boot.

The location of the program to change the hostid is :

	/afs/cad/solaris/admin/sbin/hid2_64

The hid2_64 program should be copied to /admin on the replacement system and
the following init script put into /etc/init.d/hid :

		#!/bin/sh

		# set hostid for LMGRD (from old license server)
		# <hostid>

		if [ -f /admin/hid2_64 ]; then
		        /admin/hid2_64 
 		fi


    <hostid> is the hostid of the failed license server.


The script should then be linked into /etc/rc3.d as S20hid and the system
rebooted.