Solaris

... unless i'm severely mistaken, the hostid is related to the MAC address of the box which is easily gathered through ifconfig ... it does NOT give you the box's serial number ...

You are right. The hostid is composed of machine type byte plus last three bytes of MAC. Unfortunately, serial number is composed of the MAC addr as well. That is Hw serial number = decimal string (last three byte of MAC). That is the serial number you would see on screen when you boot up.

Yes, that's the ID PROM serial number I was talking about. It's not the same as the chassis serial, bu about the best you can do without physically looking at the machine.

i just checked a box here and the last 3 characters of the hardware serial number is NOT the same last 3 characters of the hostid nor the mac ... is it possible that you are thinking about the serial number on the network card?

I was unclear in my post, I meant the serial displayed during boot, not how it was constructed. I have never bothered to look at how that was composed.

[ Thanks to Perderabo for pointing out this thread in a related but more generic thread ]

To try to clear up a little confusion long after anyone cares,
the serial number reported with the banner is the decimal equivalent of the hostid, which is (in the case of much of the Sun hardware) based on the ethernet MAC address of the built-in ethernet.

None of these are the same (or even much related to) the Chassis Serial Number which is written on the "yellow sheet" of paperwork which comes with the box, and is on a tag somewhere on the box. For the location of the tag, see the Sun System Handbook @ http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub .

For example, my 280R reports in OBP a serial of 2200545206 which is the decimal equivalent of the hostid 8329a7b6 and is clearly related to the MAC address of 0:3:ba:29:a7:b6 .
However, the actual Chassis Serial is 308AD202B .

For anyone actually trying to keep of the Chassis serial number or other information closely related to the box (asset number, location, serial numbers of attached storage, etc.) there is now a tool available from Sun called SNEEP which takes care of permanently storing the serial and other information in the system eeprom and giving you simple access to it in software.

For more information and download of sneep, see http://www.sun.com/download/products.xml?id=4304155a

Keep the packing slip that came with the server - it has both the server serial number (manufactoring number) and the hostid (host identification number). Plus the list of parts that came with the original purchase.

Since anything that could hold the information inside the server could be replaced, it would still be a manual process to enter it. If you are using snmp to monitor your servers, you can use one of those fields to enter the server serial number.

Here is a link to the breakdown of the server serial number:

http://www.sunshack.org/data/pnumber.html