alt Hacker NewsI don't like the idea of a persistent id for my machine. Would there be any harm in rewriting the machine-id at every boot? Or just deleting it as part of the shutdown sequence?
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Whatever you do there will always be uniquely identifiable information (if not an id, a fingerprint) on your machine.
If you want to escape that, you have to use dedicated privacy-enhancing tools / browsers, but even then, it's very likely that you can still be identified by motivated adversaries.
It doesn't mean you have to give up, but, if such id is necessary for technical reasons in systemd (I guess it is), I wouldn't worry too much.
I do it with an hourly cronjob and haven't noticed any ill effects.
The supported method to get a new one each boot is to truncate the file to 0 bytes and disable systemd-machine-id-commit.service
Double-check that this method actually works though.
Machine ID is used for things like dhcp leases, log rotation, etc. IPV6 addresses or transient MAC addresses are derived from it
dhcp uses it by default nowadays.. but you can tell dhcp to use your mac address instead (like it used to)..
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1498611/ubuntu-dhcp-client-u... (linked because depending on version, there are several different ways to make this change..)
You can replace it with a generic one to hopefully blend in https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-harden...