[RFC] Fixing the machine id

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Lennart Poettering <mzqohf at 0pointer.de> wrote:
> heya,
>
> one problem the D-Bus machine ID has for usage in various programs is
> that it is not available during early boot. Kay and I have been thinking
> about this for a while, and the obvious fix is of course to move it from
> /var/lib to /etc which is guaranteed to be around right from the
> beginning, and is the better place for it anyway, since it is everything
> but variable.

Sounds great!  One comment:

> So, here's what systemd now does at boot: when it finds /etc/machine-id
> populated, then everything is fine. If it is not populated, it tries to
> initialize it from /var/lib/dbus/machine-id, with a fallback on
> /dev/urandom.

My one concern is that if systemd has a /dev/urandom fallback, and
it's silently used in the case of OS misconfiguration, it could make
consumers of it unreliable.  Someone posted a DBus patch to get rid of
the file and just autogenerate it each time, but one of the major
points of this ID *is* that it's persistent; if your app or library
needs to store machine-specific state, you really don't want it to be
lost on reboot.

Or is systemd going to create /etc/machine-id from /dev/urandom
persistently?  In that case, sounds good.