Rudder

"uuidgen" is not available in the AIX base system, not is it simply installable, so our postinst script fails:

var/opt/freeware/tmp/rpm-tmp.27302[43]: uuidgen:  not found

However, AIX does come with it's own "uuid_gen": /etc/ncs/uuid_gen. This commands provides UUIDs from version 1, as defined in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier:

Conceptually, the original (version 1) generation scheme for UUIDs was to concatenate the UUID version with the MAC address of the computer that is generating the UUID, and with the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the West. This scheme has been criticized in that it is not sufficiently "opaque"; it reveals both the identity of the computer that generated the UUID and the time at which it did so. Its uniqueness across computers is guaranteed so long as MAC addresses are not duplicated (as can happen, for instance, via manual setting of the MAC address); however, given the speed of modern processors, successive invocations on the same machine of a naive implementation of a generator of version 1 UUIDs may produce the same UUID, violating the uniqueness property. (Non-naive implementations can avoid this problem by, for example, remembering the most recently generated UUID, "pocketing" unused UUIDs, and using pocketed UUIDs in case a duplicate is about to be generated.)

These limitations seem fine for us, since:

1. We actually use the UUID to identify the machine in it's inventory, which already contains the MAC address
2. We only generate one UUID on each machine, so no duplication is possible unless MAC addresses are duplicated, which is highly unlikely, and even more unlikely the UUIDs would be generated at the precise same 100-nanosecond interval.

So, I'm going to add a "uuidgen" wrapper in shell for /etc/ncs/uuid_gen that formats the UUID correctly.