Machine Identifier

updated for
June 2001

The uname -i command on your nPartition systems may not return a unique value for each system. To guarantee compatibility on current and future platforms, use the new interfaces to getconf(1) and confstr(3C) to retrieve unique machine identifiers.

For example, use the following getconf commands instead of uname -i in order to obtain a unique identifier for an HP Superdome server complex (getconf _CS_MACHINE_IDENT) or a hard partition (getconf _CS_PARTITION_IDENT) within a complex:

# uname -i
1945761737
# getconf _CS_PARTITION_IDENT
Z3e02955673f9f7c9_P1
# getconf _CS_MACHINE_IDENT
Z3e02955673f9f7c9
# 

As shown in the above example, the getconf commands return partition-unique and machine-unique (complex-unique) identifiers on HP PA-RISC nPartition servers.

The output returned by uname is not necessarily a unique identifier and should not be used for licensing or other purposes that require unique IDs.

These interfaces are documented in the manpages and in Chapter 13 “Programming” in the section “Machine Identifier Changes to confstr ”.