HP-UX 11i September 2001 Release Notes

Hard Partition Systems

Machine Identiﬁer (updated for June 2001)

Chapter 2

Machine Identiﬁer (updated for June 2001)

The uname -i command on your hard partition 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.

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 (new at 11i original release)” on page

210.