Identifying and editing a variable in memory i686pclinux

This is a solaris system:

809caf7e

User Commands hostid(1)

NAME hostid - print the numeric identifier of the current host

SYNOPSIS usr-bin-hostid

DESCRIPTION The hostid command prints the identifier of the current host in hexadecimal. This numeric value is likely to differ when hostid is run on a different machine.

SEE ALSO sysinfo(2), gethostid(3C), attributes(5)

SunOS 5.8 Last change: 14 Sep 1992 1

truss reveals that it uses the sysinfo system call:

sysinfo(SIHWSERIAL, "2157752190", 40)

The sysinfo man page has more:

SIHWSERIAL Copy into the array pointed to by buf a string which is the ASCII representation of the hardware-specific serial number of the physical machine on which the function is executed. Note that this may be imple- mented in Read-Only Memory, using software constants set when building the operating system, or by other means, and may contain non-numeric characters. It is anticipated that manufacturers will not issue the same "serial number" to more than one physical machine. The pair of strings returned by SIHWPROVIDER and SIHWSERIAL is likely to be unique across all vendor's SVR4 implementations.

My Linux system has the same commands and calls so this isn't Solaris only.