On 08-03-19 14:23, KatolaZ wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 08, 2019 at 01:47:40PM +0100, Jaromil wrote:
>> re all,
>>
>> any thoughts about this new systemd-made thing that freedesktop
>> immediately "standardized" (whatever is their procedure for that,
>> likely smoking cigars among old-boys or so)
>> https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machine-id.html
>>
>> its easy to replace by a script of course that's not the problem (the
>> manpage suggests to use a systemd application for that, not a joke!)
>> but I'm curious if anyone has some background and thoughts about this
>>
>> AFAIK chromium started checking it and its absence on Devuan Beowulf
>> is reported as an error, so we may have to work around this.
>>
>> but first things first: do we want /etc/machine-id? and how?
>>
> Jaromil,
>
> this is currently managed by eudev in devuan and, IIRC, it is simply
> regenerated as a random ID at each boot. I guess it's still there
> because it is used by several things, including
> session-management-related stuff. We had a discussion on IRC with Mark
> (LeePen) about that several weeks ago, and IIRC we concluded that
> keeping it around but re-generating it at boot was the way to avoid
> breakage.
>
> Any thoughts on the matter are appreciated, but concrete insight on
> the ins and outs are much more useful I guess (read: please let's
> avoid a useless uninformed flame about that :P).
>
> My2Cents
>
> KatolaZ
>
I opened the link and read:

- that it should replace the POSIX gethostid(3) call,
- that it should be unique,
- should be confidential
- and last but not least it is supplemental to D-Bus machine ID.
/var/lib/dbus/machine-id could even be a symlink to /etc/machine-id

Besides the possibility to network boot with the systemd.machine_id= 
kernel commandline i do not see any advantage to user of
systemadministrator. I do see the possibilities to abuse it and the only
reason for existing i can think of is DRM or surveillance.

If this is  flaming, so be it.

Grtz.

Nick