Re: duplicate popularity-contest ID

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@debian.org>]

> Change popularity-contest by transmissing the hostid after it has been
> hashed with the content of /etc/machine-id.

Heh, there is no /etc/machine-id on my Debian system.

I have an …/etc/machine-id in buster and stretch chroots I created
and xenial, bionic and disco pbuilder base.cow directories, and
a /var/lib/dbus/machine-id file on my host system (sid), another sid
chroot, and the stretch chroot.


But depending only on files is the wrong approach anyway.

I’ve published images for Debian/m68k back when I was still
active in the revival business. I *had* preinstalled popcon
but removed the hostid and included running dpkg-reconfigure
in the first-boot-setup instructions. (Maybe few did, but I
reset the package state, so the first apt call would do.)

The thing is, unless you create clones from a running system,
and never distribute an image for others to use, you cannot
just recreate them automatically on first start (otherwise
they’ll likely turn out the same), you need some user input,
outside-world date/time, hardware IDs (MAC addresses are a
start, full dmesg is better) and random bits.

I envision a thing that, while booting a cloned VM/image,
interactively asks the user for some keystrokes and offers
to download random data from a couple of known systems (I
know of four or five and have my own as well) or a manual
URL or by ssh’ing out (ssh -l user host dd if=/dev/urandom
count=4 | dd of=/dev/urandom). — This can only work if the
image is first-booted interactively, though. (It then has
to recreate SSH host keys, popcon ID, and apparently a
machine-id file I know nothing about… plus there are things
you cannot regenerate like filesystem-embedded NFS generation
numbers, crypto and LV names… you might wish to change the
hostname and perhaps the ext2fs label but for doing the same
to swap it needs to be recreated, and ext2fs retains the UUID,
etc.)

Cloning systems is doomed to fail ☹

For my m68k case, it might have been useful to use as bootstrap
image (write it into your swap partition, boot it from TOS,
create new ext4 and debootstrap there, reboot that, mkswap over
the temp image). Others like solutions like ANSI-BEL, Puppet,
preseeding d-i, shell scripts, …

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
<diogenese> Beware of ritual lest you forget the meaning behind it.
<igli> yeah but it means if you really care about something, don't
    ritualise it, or you will lose it. don't fetishise it, don't
    obsess. or you'll forget why you love it in the first place.