I’ve been researching information about /etc/machine-id, a file that contains an ever-persistent machine ID that identifies the install across hardware or netwotk changes, and that is world-readable.

Most documentation I’ve seen says it is mostly safe to change this file and generate a new ID on shutdown, and there are example scripts to do it via eg.: systemd or rc.shutdown . That’s nice, but… we’re on Linux, we don’t “shutdown” our machines, what do they think we are, Windows users? We don’t shutdown at least intentionally.

So, I was wondering, is it feasible to regenerate this ID on hibernate? It’s another instance where the machine powers down, there are ACPI hooks to run scripts on hibernate/wakeup, and I feel at least for a laptop it’s a more common use case than a shutdown.